Airborn Toxic Event-Changing...a musical interlude

The Airborne Toxic Event (formed 2006) A most literary Band.

The Airborne Toxic Event, who got their name from Don DeLillo's book White Noise, are an American indie rock band from Los Angeles. The lineup of the band consists of Mikel Jollett on vocals and guitar, Steven Chen on keyboards, Daren Taylor on drums, Anna Bulbrook on viola and bass player Noah Harmon.

The Airborne Toxic Event: Formation

The band formed in 2006 when Mikel Jollett's novel writing took an unexpected turn and he found himself writing songs instead of prose. Jollett had recently discovered that his mother had been diagnosed with cancer as well as being diagnosed himself with genetic Autoimmune disease.

That summer, Jollett met Daren Taylor and the pair immediately hit it off. They began working together as a two-piece before asking Anna Bulbrook and Noah Harmon to join the band. Steven Chen joined later, as he had met Jollett several years previously, when they had both lived in San Francisco.

Prior to starting the band, Jollett worked as a freelance journalist, contributing to publications such as Los Angeles Times, Filter Magazine and Men's Health. Since the band's incarnation, though, he has continued to write only fiction and has had a short story published in a collection alongside a story by Stephen King. In the summer of 2008, McSweeney's issue 27 published one of Jollett’s short stories, The Crack, which appeared between short stories by Liz Mandrell and Stephen King.^[2] In keeping with his literary background, Jollett named the band after a section of the postmodern novel White Noise,^[3] which won the National Book Award in 1985. In the book, a chemical spill from a railcar releases a poisonous cloud, dubbed by the military and media as an "airborne toxic event". The reason for choosing this as the name of the band, he has stated, is that the event described in the novel triggers a fear of death and a sense of mortality that fundamentally alters the protagonist’s outlook on himself, his family, and his life.*

*From Wikipedia