LIVE MUSIC: Magus Magnus and Hero Magnus

Singer-songwriter Hero Magnus returns to her hometown with her debut album . Now based in Brooklyn, New York, Hero grew up in Alexandria and began her music career around the Washington, DC hardcore scene, working for legendary studio Inner Ear and opening for punk bands. As an undergraduate at Yale, she released her first EP Make Me a Man, which explores queer love and desire through adaptations of stories from ancient mythology.How Do You Leave a Warm Dark Place is an indie rock and indie folk record about newness and its inevitable end. It’s about our relationship to home, childhood, the womb, and all the other comfortable but transitory places where we shelter. The album was produced and mixed by James Duncan (Taraneh, Pisha, Nara’s Room) and mastered by Heather Jones (sadurn, MJ Lenderman, They Are Gutting a Body of Water). Hero has been touring with the album since its April release across the East Coast, as well as in New Orleans and San Francisco, and all over NYC.

Poet Magus Magnus latest book released this summer from BlazeVOX [books]. With The Killing Joke, Magnus activates the Trickster Archetype, tracing three points of focus: Killing Joke, the post-punk band; the Joker-centered Batman graphic novel by Alan Moore and its variations in different media; and the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with its lethal joke sketch – “no one can hear it and live.” Throughout this work there is the overriding image dialectic of the trickster here as jester, as Evil Clown, as death symbol. Last laugh’s on us. Acclaimed comedian Tig Notaro said of Magnus' The Killing Joke: “This book is just more proof that comedy can K*ll. And has.”