Tuned In to The Airborne Toxic Event

January 28, 2010 9:41:40 AM PST
Our featured artist(s) this week is The Airborne Toxic Event. They are a Rock band from Southern California who got their name from a passage in Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. Their hit song "Sometime Around Midnight" has been lighting up the music charts around the world. Much of this success can be attributed to their popularity on the internet as well as on the traditional media.

Their lead singer, Mikel Jollett, is a novelist who overcame personal tragedy, while writing songs that have struck a chord with millions of music fans.

We caught up with them during a special WRFF, Radio104.5 studio session.

Here is their biography

The Airborne Toxic Event ?


"The best debut CD of 2008." THE BOSTON HERALD


"Packed with widescreen rock of very high quality...call that a tribute to the undeniable power of Mikel Jollett's songwriting." THE GUARDIAN


"Inebriated celebrations of love's boundless optimism." BLENDER







It was the final night of the band's five-week residency at the legendary Eastside venue, and all that month, when they weren't rehearsing or performing, they were busy self-recording their first full-length album at a friend's home studio in Eagle Rock. For the past week their song, "Sometime Around Midnight," had unexpectedly been played again and again on KROQ, the biggest rock radio station in the world. The highly respected Indie 103.1 had suddenly started playing it too.

It quickly became the most requested song on both stations, despite the fact that it had no "chorus" or "hook." The song was essentially a poem set to music describing the desperate inner monologue of a man seeing a lost love at a bar with someone else. One critic described it as Leonard Cohen backed by the Jesus and Mary Chain.


It was an odd moment, one in which it seemed that whatever rules had been established in the music world suddenly didn't apply and all the connections, money, favors and advertisements faded in the face of music people wanted to hear.


Chen: "This is really strange."

Jollett: "Yes. It is."


"Something in me snapped," Jollett says. "Like, I literally just lost my mind and didn't care about anything. Except music." Emerging from a month-long haze (in which he also went through nicotine withdrawal, quitting a two-pack-a-day habit), the published author suddenly found himself with a mad desire to do nothing but play music. Which is what he did, alone in his apartment, every day for the next year.

Though he continued to write prose (a section of his novel is excerpted as a short story in the June 2008 McSweeney's), at some point he realized that he was writing a rock and roll record instead of a book.


They felt perhaps they were on to something.




Having discovered the postmodern writer Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, the band took its name from a section of that book in which the main character is exposed to an enormous chemical explosion?dubbed by the media in Orwellian double-speak: "the Airborne Toxic Event."



"Everyone's got to sweat," Jollett says. "Something, as opposed to nothing, has to happen. You've got to wonder if a riot is going to break out or if the whole place is going to burn down. That's what makes it rock and roll. Otherwise it's just folk with a back-beat."

It was this feeling of catharsis?the live energy created by the soaring, jagged songs?that the band set out to capture in the studio. Teaming up with friend Pete Min in his home studio in the mountainous Los Angeles neighborhood Eagle Rock, the band spent six months recording and mixing, remixing and obsessing over reverb. They made the album themselves, having turned down offers from major producers.

Soon the upstart West Coast indie imprint Majordomo offered the band a partnership indie deal (structured very much like Radiohead's progressive deal with TBD), so they took it. At the time, they had exactly one label mate (the local Silver Lake band, Earlimart).

In their first year as a traveling band, the Airborne Toxic Event played more than 200 shows. During one stint in November, 2008, they played 30 shows in 30 days in the United Kingdom, managing to visit just about every corner of the England, Wales and Scotland?even tiny towns like Stoke-on-Trent, Yeovil, Barrow-in-Furnace and Fife?places that most British bands don't go. Word of their raucous show spread, and when the record came out in the UK in February 2009, it debuted in the top 40 of the UK pop charts.

This was an unheard-of feat for a band that was self-releasing a record in the UK (since Majordomo didn't have a UK division). Every single show of its follow-up UK tour in the spring was sold out. (As were future shows: one infamous London show in a 900-capacity venue sold out in 15 minutes)?

Back in the United States, the single "Sometime Around Midnight" continued to climb the radio charts, eventually cracking the top five. It was the first time a band on an independent label had done so in 20 years.

Around the same time, the song was named the number-one Alternative song of the year by iTunes (a list that included Band of Horses, Glasvegas, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend and Coldplay). This was followed by a notorious appearance on David Letterman (the band had previously played Conan O'Brien), featuring their friends the Calder Quartet and one flabbergasted outburst by the usually indifferent David Letterman.



The Airborne Toxic Event are neither icons, nor saviors (they would say "there's nothing to save, it saved us,"), nor pop stars, nor disinterested hipsters? They're just a group of friends traveling from place to place, playing oddly redemptive songs, written during some oddly painful times.


Please enjoy the performance video from their Radio 104.5 studio session

You are now Tuned In to The Airborne Toxic Event

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