Video Interview: Ninja Sex Party Discuss Their "The Mystic Crystal" Music Video, New Music, and More!

One of the best things comedy-rock duo Ninja Sex Party is known for is their plethora of music videos. Over the course of nearly 12 years, Dan Avidan (AKA Danny Sexbang) and Brian Wecht (AKA Ninja Brian) have released a whopping 55 music videos ranging from their original comedy songs to their 70’s and 80’s cover songs. In the early days of the band, NSP music videos used their low-budget quality to their comedic advantage. But over time, and as the duo steadily gained popularity, they were able to increase the production quality on these projects. And their most recent music video, “The Mystic Crystal” is the magnum opus fans have been anticipating.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Dan and Brian over Zoom to talk about all things “The Mystic Crystal”: from the writing process to some of their favorite memories filming the live-action portion, and to what it was like working with the animation team, the Knights of the Light Table!

Ninja Sex Party is no stranger to writing epic rock operas. In 2015, the duo released their song “6969”, which clocked in at eight and a half minutes. With “The Mystic Crystal” however, they decided to go above and beyond by making the song nearly 12 minutes long. “Well, my dream was for it to be 20 minutes long initially.” Dan continues, “It’s sort of an homage to these 70’s progressive rock songs… where the song would be a story and they would usually clock in at 20 minutes. We just figured we’d follow that structure and see where the song landed, time-wise. And 12 minutes is what it ended up being.”

And they certainly were able to tell fans a story. A tale as old as time, some may say. A princess gets kidnapped, and the heroes go on a journey to save the day! But instead of your daring heroes slaying the villain with a sword, Danny Sexbang attempts to change the evil necromancer’s heart. How you may ask? With the power of love, of course. And in true NSP fashion, when that fails, Ninja Brian beats the necromancer to death with Danny’s mangled body. Hooray! The princess, now rescued, carries her injured rescuer back to the castle, where the heroes are celebrated, Brian murders a man, and the story ends. What a lovely tale!

But, when the time came to turn this song into a full-on music video, NSP hit a little bump in the road. “A big part of The Mystic Crystal video is that we get in this space where we’re like ‘and there’s a dragon, and we’re flying into space!’ and then we budget it out… there’s no way we can make this video.” Brian explains, “So we did a fundraiser where we sold these pins. We didn’t want to do a Kickstarter, mainly because we wanted people to have a thing they can point at and say ‘I got this because I supported that.’ We’d calculated how many of these we’d need to sell to afford the video, we sold all the pins needed to finance it, and we were able to make the video we wanted to make because the fans showed up for it.”

Now, NSP finally had the budget to make their dreams of this music video a reality!

“It was amazing.” Brian reminisces, “I just remember walking onto that set the first day where they’d built a throne room and a crappy apartment all right on the same stage. I was just like ‘oh my god!’ It felt super legit, to see this thing come from this song we’d written a few years before to suddenly be real.”

As they chatted, Brian and Dan expressed their gratitude towards their fans multiple times throughout this interview. When asked about how it feels to have their fans connect so deeply with the content that NSP puts out, Dan said, “There’s not really words for it… The difference between our early days and now is now when we do something we actually know that somebody’s gonna watch it… I don’t know if we can put into words how meaningful it is.”

This was only a little taste of the full interview with Dan and Brian, so make sure you watch the video for a more behind-the-scenes talk on “The Mystic Crystal”, insight on their inner workings as a band, and information about the future Ninja Sex Party albums!