NewVillager's music shares a great deal of sonic DNA with Animal Collective's psych-electronics and the falsetto soul of TV on the Radio or Yeasayer. But the Brooklyn and San Francisco band, composed of Ben Bromley and Ross Simonini, has created its own cult. In late June, Iamsound Records is bringing out Bromley and Simonini's self-titled debut album, and this month saw the release of their video for the song "Lighthouse," directed by Ben Dickinson. This elaborate miniature art film, with costume design by Judge Finklea, draws on various sources, according to the pair: film director Sergei Parajanov, artists Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the sound suits of Nick Cave. We spoke with the band about invented myths, art games, and why the Internet is saving music videos.

The concept of NewVillager in general, and the video for "Lighthouse," involves a self-invented cosmology. What myths and invented legends have been woven into the NewVillager mystique?

Everything about NewVillager revolves around a mythology that we partially created, partially found in books, and partially heard about in a sort of oral tradition way. It's all created as a way of understanding the process of change, breaking it down into parts. Myths all over the world have so much in common and we really wanted to make something that was the synthesis of all that, rather than creating something purely new, create something perennial and common. So the video for "Lighthouse" is based on this same mythology. The mythos has ten stages and the ten songs on the album follow this: there are ten symbols, and there are ten characters in the video, each one manifesting a different stage. You can follow the ten characters pretty clearly. There are four red, one black, four blue, one white, and the narrative moves, in some ways, with that order. They all have certain qualities and actions that, for us, represent each stage (or song). How do you go from being ignorant to curious to confused to actually building something? It's like you experience all these different personas, which are part of basic transformation, of creating something. The video is how we get at that.

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The costumes involved in this video are quite elaborate, like the result of an imaginary Matthew Barney/Olaf Breuning collaboration. What other artists/visuals ended up on the proverbial inspiration wall for "Lighthouse"?

We talked a lot about the work of Sergei Parajanov, an Armenian director whose known for a film called "The Color of Pomegranates" and who creates a lot of tableaux and painterly imagery — the kind Kubrick used in "Barry Lyndon." Joseph Beuys is one of our favorites, the way he integrated myth into objects. Robert Smithson was discussed at length. Many email threads and images were passed around. Ben Dickinson, the director, is a Jodorowsky fan, and some of the imagery definitely comes from that tradition. Nick Cave's sound suits are pretty undeniable. Some of the face makeup was derived from Papua New Guinea tribes. West African shaman garments, Maya Deren — it's all in there. Ben Dickinson, the director, and Judge Finklea, the costume designer, helped to build and envision these.

Why aren't more music videos like short art films? Do you still have faith in the medium?

It seems that, these days, with YouTube, music videos can really be anything. There's no longer a censor or a filter such as MTV. A lot of amazing video work — by Ryan Trecartin, or Kalup Linzy, or Yemenwed, or anything on UbuWeb — can be seen as easily as the new video by that hip band, Walla Walla. So hopefully the form will open up a bit with this freedom. It does seem to be having some kind of a revival, maybe, but, of course, it's been a deeply artistic form for a while now. We're working on a trailer and a handful of more performative videos that we're hoping will be seen as widely as the more traditional-looking videos. Our previous video, for "Rich Doors," was basically just documenting a big art game we created in our house, and there it is, online, pretending to be a real music video. All forms are fair game these days. Good news for us art weirdos.