The surreal stop-motion video for the song "Darkness" by the psychedelic soul band King Khan and the Shrines, which has its world premiere here, deals with some heavy issues: life, death, what it's like to be shot out of a cannon. For Arish Ahmad Khan, the band's Berlin-based, Montreal-born, Indian frontman, the themes and aesthetics of the clip, created by the five-person German animation collective Hylas, were a perfect match for his own. "I would go in their workshop and watch them film three seconds in eight hours," he said. It was fascinating. Hylas adapted the video, which features a strongman with a mohawk and a mysterious Native American shaman in addition to the human cannon fodder, from their continuing stop-motion series called "Circus," about a traveling circus trapped in a strange place. "They first shot the piece as an experiment for another project," Khan explained. When they showed it to me I fell in love with it, so we added another 30 seconds and made into the music video. "Darkness," which will be featured on the group's Merge Records release "Idle No More" (out Sept. 3), its first in six years, reflects Khan's own heavy issues. "I sort of had a breakdown and was undergoing these serious psychiatric things, so I had to turn off my brain completely," he admitted. These tracks come after thinking I'd never write music again. The album's title is intended to reflect solidarity with a nascent Canadian protest movement that supports the sovereign rights of indigenous people. "It's all about taking pain and suffering and turning it into joy," Khan said. That's the music people need the most.