But more than being an outsized figure in this year’s political strife since suffering a stroke following the Aug. 11 and 12 rallies, he’s a musician. And as one half of Grand Banks, he and Davis Salisbury have been excavating the boundaries of ambient, drone, improvisation and noise for the better part of 17 years.

The duo’s show on Monday at Low Vintage counts as Grand Banks’ first public performance since the August rallies. And while Magill said his recent health problems are a concern, he said they won’t affect his ability to jam impromptu or change the band’s tenor.

“I’m not going to be one of these people who says there’s an artistic sphere that goes completely untouched by these occurrences in the world,” the keyboardist said, sitting on the stoop of his Charlottesville home on a recent Saturday afternoon. On Oct. 11, a lawsuit was filed by the nonprofit Integrity First for America that seeks remuneration for the alleged violation of individuals’ civil rights around the August rallies. Magill, local members of the clergy and several University of Virginia students who participated in the rallies are being represented by the IFA attorneys.

“I don’t see us going all Robert Wyatt or putting out ‘Grand Banks’ Little Red Book,’ but it’s going to have a huge effect on me. I don’t know what that’ll be. … We don’t necessarily talk about what we’re going to do [musically]. We reflect on it.”

The beginning of the band, though, is intrinsically tied to the now-defunct Pudhaus, a DIY space in Belmont the pair ran after it was founded by USA is a Monster’s Colin Langenus and Tom Hohmann. Magill and Salisbury took over booking for the space, which closed in 2004, during 2001 — not long after starting Grand Banks.

At its height, there were three or four shows booked at the venue each week, Salisbury said, explaining that maintaining the spartan space was a way to foster the scene in town while also providing Grand Banks a place to plunder performances.

“You’d have these bands coming through, going totally econo,” Magill said about acts that frequented Pudhaus. “They’re all held together with twine and baling tape. It was totally seat-of-the-pants. They’d rip your face off and come off stage and they’d just be dudes.”

“It was inspiring that these bands started coming here,” Salisbury added. “I don’t think we fit in with those bands, but it was a better fit than whatever was going on here.”

At the time, though, Grand Banks offered a more confrontational aural aesthetic than some of its dreamier, introspective sets of the past few years.

Recordings from 2001 find the pair still exploring how their modes of performance fit together. Salisbury’s playing seemed more tied to traditional guitar styles, as opposed to some of the prepared guitar stuff he’s been up to more recently. Grand Banks live, though, apparently was something different.

“Our tastes have changed, where volume is not usually the first place we’re going now,” Salisbury said, explaining Grand Banks’ various, developing personalities. “I think we’re a better band — we can go in more directions now.”

“It’s just having a permanent headache,” Magill agreed, recalling that volume and feedback were as much of the band’s personality as anything else early on. “We’ve done it.”

Gear, endlessly fated to crap out on stage, added — and still does — to the uncertainty of their completely improvised sets. It’s unlikely to hear Grand Banks play something familiar, though a cover of Texas avant-gardist Mayo Thompson has been known to crop up occasionally. But this is cerebral music for both listener and performer. Magill and Salisbury, though, aren’t precious about Grand Banks and its two decades of music; they don’t need to be. As an established and ongoing avant-concern in Charlottesville, left-field bills in town frequently have a spot for the duo.

It all seemed to be put on pause after the rallies, though.

“When I hit the door to the hospital ... it was some sort of clot buster that they just threw down my throat,” Magill recalled about suffering a stroke in August. “Most people, when they have the kind of stroke I had, they’re dead. There was a 1 percent chance I lived through that; then there’s a 1 percent chance that I’m not a vegetable; then there’s a 1 percent chance that I don’t walk around with half of my face and body paralyzed. I walked out of the hospital two days later. … [Doctors] look at me and they shake their heads.”

“Will it affect my ability to play music? No,” he continued a bit later. “It’s always been about taking the limitations of the instruments, the room or whatever … we are playing our limitations to a large extent. And that’s what makes it interesting.”

For “QB7: 601BC-AD1649,” Grand Banks’ most recent release that culls recordings from the Pudhaus era, the pair dispense whorling streams of consciousness, as Salisbury’s guitar picks out a stubborn rhythm and Magill grinds out endless keyboard murmurs functioning as bedrock for improvisation. In places, it all comes off like the most minimal of krautrock jams. In others, it’s a proto-industrial miasma. That listeners feel anything other than the fraught beauty of what it means to experiment musically in the 21st century is a bonus.

But Grand Banks is about freedom as much as improvisatory magic, and the surprises available to those exploring the outer reaches of Western music.

“One of the beautiful things about Grand Banks is that if we malfunction on stage,” Salisbury said, “most people would read that as, ‘Oh, that was an interesting Grand Banks set.’”

The pair taking 17 years to best direct the use of those accidental wrinkles, though, only has made Magill and Salisbury keen on seeing — and hearing — what the next two decades might sound like for Grand Banks. And show-goers on Monday get an opportunity to catch the band for the first time since July, perhaps newly emboldened by the national political climate. Or perhaps not.