John: Who are you and what do you do?
Andrew: Bass.
Austin: Guitar and vocals.
Dan: Guitar.
Will: Drums.
John: Now Austin, you left for awhile.
Austin: I did. For about a year...
John: Because?
Austin: Uh, because I had just graduated college and moved home to Jersey and just needed a break. I wanted to try something new with an older band of mine that didn`t really work out. Through that not working out, I came to see some of the virtues in being in Agnosis. When they needed a new guitar player, I was right there to jump back in.
John: When did you guys start?
Andrew: I started this back in 2002, but we went through so many changes. And the stuff we were doing at the beginning was really different.
John: Like hip hop beats?
Will: You haven`t met our old DJ.
Andrew: DJ Grim moved out to Stanford to study math. So he`s not with us anymore.
Will: DJ Grim being our old guitarist.
Andrew: When Austin came back there was definitely a different dynamic. At the beginning, I kinda called the shots pretty much all the way.
John: Because you had the longest hair?
Andrew: Actually no, my hair back then wasn`t that long. That`s probably why our music was worse too. When Austin and I originally sat down again - it was winter `05, `06 just generally talking about playing more doomy music than what we were doing with Agnosis or his band. It eventually came to be that we had another major lineup shift in Agnosis that resulted in us deciding to keep the name and rebuilding from that.
John: Now what would you say are your primary influences?
Andrew: It probably varies considerably from person to person.
Austin: They`re really across the board.
Will: Which is probably what gives it a hopefully unique sound. Because generally if you get a band full of guys listening to the same thing not that there`s anything wrong with that but when that happens, you`ll generally get that kind of sound. So, you know...
Austin: To take a step back, when Andrew and I first started getting together, the original decision we made was, Hey, let`s get together and write some dark, heavy music. And I`ve always held onto that. I want to write dark, heavy music. So, it`s less any one band than an idea.
John: (to Dan) Now what the hell are you doing here?
Austin: No one knows.
Dan: Well, I showed up with a guitar and plugged in and they didn`t tell me to go away, so I just kept showing up.
John: Now when did you join the band?
Dan: It was what - a month, a month and a half maybe?
Austin: A couple months ago.
Will: I would say in May.
Andrew: Basically Dan was kind of our-
Austin: Dan was our biggest fan (laughs).
Andrew: He was also our biggest fan in the New York city area. He had played with Austin in Onto Others, which was his other band.
Austin: My band through high school and college. So Dan and I go way back. So he actually came to me with the idea of him playing in Agnosis. And at first it was a little strange we were doing really well as a three-piece, but I`m a sucker for all things twin guitar and harmonies and all that. Once we pulled him down to practice and heard how it sounded it was pretty much a no-brainer.
John: Was there a lot of reworking with the previously written music?
Austin: A little bit. We spent some time with it. A lot of it wasn`t that hard to do; it was a matter of taking the parts that I was playing and splitting them out. And some things did need more reworking than that. Most of it, not too much. And we really got straight to work at writing new stuff that`s aimed at having two guitars.
John: Like what you played tonight? You did what, two songs? And one of them was 20 minutes?
Andrew: Yeah, we`ve got our 20 minute song.
