Airborne Toxic Event
Every postmodernist worth his or her salt knows Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise, and its chief technological horror. But a merry band of dark indie poppers from Los Angeles’ fertile Silver Lake hood has adopted The Airborne Toxic Event as its own, in order to communicate bleeding-heart narratives of love, death and Dylar.
Squeezed somewhere between mainstreamers Echo and the Bunnymen, U2 and Heavenly States on the post-punk music map, The Airborne Toxic Event boasts some nice resumes. Front man Mikel Jollett has worked either side of the sonic divide, as a journo for National Public Radio, Los Angeles Times and Men’s Health; he’s even published a shorty in McSweeney’s. Other members of the band are classically trained and credentialed in music. The post-doc work has piled up nicely: The Airborne Toxic Event has lately caught the Silverlake comet tail in Rolling Stone, on Conan...
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Named for a line in the Don DeLillo book White Noise L.A. band The Airborne Toxic Event suddenly found itself this year with a shit-hot full-length album recorded and a song in regular play on a major radio station, but without a label or a manager. Heeb caught up with the band before a recent show in San Francisco, on a day when the future seemed entirely vague. Since then, they have appeared on The Late Show with Carson Daly, which we all know is a precursor to mega stardom, signed with Majordomo, and announced the July 15th release of their first full-length album.
Lead singer Mikel Jollett started A.T.E. (sorry guys, but you need a mod acronym) a few years back as a reaction to a confluence of shitty...
Mikel Jollett once discovered the perfect complement to his band’s live stage setup in a junkyard.
The frontman of Los Feliz five-piece The Airborne Toxic Event had trekked to a local facility along with drummer Daren Taylor to sift through rubbish in search of a “big metallic sound.” With golf club and bat in hand, the two began banging until they stumbled upon just the right clunk: the hood of a 1969 Alfa Romeo, which would later be incorporated into the gaggle of L.A. shows that Airborne would play over the next year.
Though they’ve parted ways with the hood, Jollett seems keen on a revival: “At some point if we get to be a bigger band, we’ll probably bring the car hood back and actually start a whole junkyard percussion thing for Daren,” he jokes.
For a while, it didn’t seem like any band in L.A. was bigger than The Airborne Toxic Event. Considering the group’s penchant for atypical...
Go here for the interview and in-studio performance
The Airborne Toxic Event
The next time you’re at your local bookstore, thumb through a 2008 edition of whatever dictionary is handy, and look up the term ‘meteoric.’ Next to the definition you should be able to make out one of those quaint, faux-woodcut style illustrations Miriam-Webster has such a soft spot for, a pseudo-etching of five L.A. musicians: fig. 1: The Airborne Toxic Event.
Originally a cathartic outlet for Mikel Jollett (vocals, guitar, keyboard), Airborne began as a two-piece with Darren Taylor (drums, adrenaline) before, like Don DeLillo’s billowing cloud from which the band takes its name, it grew to absorb Anna Bulbrook (viola, keyboard, tambourine), Steven Chen (guitar, keyboard), and Noah Harmon (bass, high kicks). On the strength of their songs (which careen from the hipgrip sway of dancing, footstomping indie to whirling, brutally...
Really Good First Record’
How do you start a story about a band who takes their name from a term created by writer Don DeLillo for his novel, White Noise, about a deadly chemical cloud that kills off communities as it spreads across the sky moving from town to town. It sounds surreal, which is exactly what guitarist Steven Chen of The Airborne Toxic Event describes about being in this band, and playing to audiences that are drawn to their music and coming into the venues in droves when they see the band’s name on the marquee. The Airborne Toxic Event’s crowds are expanding similarly to the rate that a toxic cloud progresses in mass as it moves along its path consuming greater numbers of people along its travels.
The Airborne Toxic Event formed in California, the Silver Lake distinct...
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“Is this them?” he whispered into my ear as we peered up at unknown faces.“They’re good, but I don’t think it’s them.” The trio then struck their last chord leaving the stage, and my belly rumbled.
“I’m starving – how much longer is this going to be?”
“This band will change your life, they’re going to be BIG, and I mean HUGE,” Barry, my music aficionado friend informed me.
With expectations soaring, and my blood sugar levels crashing, I hoped that I’d made the right decision to cancel my dinner date plans and bust out a 40-minute drive to the Echo. A group of five dressed in black smuggled themselves and their gear...