The Agit Reader: An Interview with El Jesus de Magico

The Agit Reader: An Interview with El Jesus de Magico

by Kevin J. Elliott

Just Deserts—what does it mean? I know you guys are deep into nature, Gnosticism, ritual and psychotropic experimentation, so are we are to just take this album at face value or is there something underneath the surface we need to be looking for? 

Michael O’Shaughnessy: As far as the titles go, they are usually the last things added to pieces or albums. Short of a few of Jon’s solid title ideas, song names and record titles have always been Tony’s work. Maybe he decided that since Jon and I came up with such a stupid name for the band, he wouldn’t let either of us name anything else. Or, maybe it’s because when we talk about one song or another, we use signifiers from our own language as a band. “Jear jiki jear ja jear, jiki jear, jieeeeer” is the intro to “LGNO,” for example. Surely this sounds bland and demystifying, but it’s the truth. The titles, while brilliant, mean nothing to me as the drummer but so much to me as a listener. I have clear pictures of each song in my head while playing them, but they are myopic and solipsistic compared to the picture I get when I listen to the record and the band as a whole. I have a silly idea as to what Just Deserts means, but I want to keep that in my pocket and think about it on my deathbed. So yes, more deism, yes, more ergot and wormwood and look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’ll get your Just Deserts. Just spell it right. 

Tony Allman: To me, it’s the notion of being left, even on the smallest, most minor scale, what an ending sounds like if no one is there to witness it. 

I know this record has been in the can for a while now, but has just been released. How long ago was it finished? Where was the band’s collective headspace at that time? 

TA: It has been done for quite a while. It was sequenced a little over a year ago and most of it recorded long before that. I’m not really sure about the collective headspace. We were very far apart in many ways. 

MO: Tony finished this version of the record last summer. He had done a version before and sent it to Adam Smith (of Columbus Discount Records) to press at Musicol, but the EQ on the B-side was all womperjaw and sounded bad to everyone after the lathe was cut. Most of the songs were from the last few weeks at the funeral home (the band’s old rehearsal space) before Tony moved to that little borough where trends go to die, and then there was a slice or two from a session at Columbus Discount Records when Tony came back to grab the last of his stuff that I didn’t destroy before he signed the lease in that city of infinite rendezvous. Jon howled like a poorly exorcised ghost, and it was the type of sound that vinyl can’t capture.