While Johnny Basil holds many titles–underground music tastemaker, new age cowboy fashion icon, DJ, vaunted record collector, master occultist, master anti-occultist, rogue intelligence affiliated, Orange County’s most far-out psychedelic loner, proud employee at Ubiquity Records–the Huntington Beach eccentric sees himself as three things: “I’m always the Outlaw, I’m always a sage, and I’m always the hermit.” Basil also explains what he’s sure he is not: “I’m not a spinning ball. I’m not falling off an edge. I’m in the electromagnetic realm…I live by the blades of the grass, the birds, the bees, the flowers, and the trees.” 

Basil is most known as DJ Johnny Basil, spinning vinyls from his crates of rare records around Southern California–a collection so impressive that Basil is featured in the 2015 documentary The Library Music Film as an expert in the obscure genre. His DJing also garnered an opening gig for The Growlers, multiple OC Register features dubbing him a “psychedelic loner,” and an impromptu VICE feature commending his new-age cowboy swagger. Basil expresses how the sudden recognition has been amusing: “The world didn’t have Johnny Basil. And then, all of a sudden, it got Johnny.” 

While it’s clear that he can spin with the best of them, Johnny Basil explains that being a good DJ is just a natural product of him being a well-rounded, compositional musician since breaking out the drums around the age of four: “You know, a lot of people don’t even understand this. They just think of me as a DJ, or they might have seen some photos of me. They don’t even understand this complete compositional background; that’s why I’m a good DJ.”

Sitting in his home studio, surrounded by shelves of eclectic records and esoteric books, Johnny Basil plays me a few extremely rare vinyls from his obscure collection before sharing a selection of tracks ranging across his 30-plus year barely released discography playing in a variety of bands and projects: from his multi-instrumental work in 90s groove band Sol, jazz fusion outfit West Coast Harem, Kraftwerk-esque techno group NON STOP,  Basil & Friends deep EDM/ECM euro jazz project, and early project Heru Avenger to his more recent collaborative bass and conceptual work on jazz fusion duo BAAST (with R. Scott) and sleazy disco EP “Basil & Rogers” (with Body Rogers). 

Having only selectively released his music up until this point through his label Initiates International, Johnny Basil’s entire extended discography will soon be widely released via Ubiquity Records, the label Johnny has worked for since the days of “Luv N Haight,” (a “fantastic place,” he describes). An underground musician to his core, Basil expresses pure excitement about finally sharing his music with the world: “I feel like I can die happy right now. I mean, I’ve made so many incredible records. “Happy, you know, yeah, I made mine more. I don’t have to make any more records, but I want to.” He is also sure to credit his booker, Danny Rose, for helping get him to share the music with the world. Additionally, he's set to collaborate on a new ongoing live project with close friend BIX-- inspired by mid 70s Cluster german duos, Bixby & Basil will perform at the Wayfarer on October 28th featuring special guests.

Discussing what’s been driving his creative energies at the moment, Johnny Basil says it’s his upcoming one-man-show, Basil Magique: “I’m just focused right now on solo shows or just, like, having a guest or something. And, yeah, I’m going up to Jim Morrison’s prophecy, who says, because they asked him in his last interview, ‘What’s the future of music?’ and he goes, ‘Well, it’s gonna be a guy with a bunch of machines.’ So I’m gonna fulfill that because Basil Magique will be mostly me with my sequences improvising–interesting, like, rhythmic, esoteric sequences. Ambient, trance, kind of music.”

Johnny goes on to explain how pop culture has also obscured the actual reality of the super-intelligent electromagnetic realm we all actually exist in: “I have already lived in the principle of the design which is magnificent because it’s right in front of your face…But they do hide in plain sight, they obscure. That’s all the smoke and mirrors. That’s all the black magic, right? That’s what the industry is. Rock and roll is mind control. It always was. Fashion is fascism.” 

After clarifying that Frank Sinatra was, actually, a “psyop,” Basil reveals his “grand thesis: the psycho-meta-alchemical techniques and mechanism of civilization control and its societies within…Or, my sarcastic, cynical version: Bread and Circus Maximus, Rock and Roll-us, 007-Love-Dionysian-style.” To be frank, I don’t know what the hell Johnny Basil is talking about. But, hey, his records sound great, and his purple flower vaporizer is running hot. 

Photographed by Isaac Dektor

Written by Oliver Heffron