Airborne Toxic Event

The Airborne Toxic Event is an American rock band from Los Angeles, California, formed in 2006. It consists of Mikel Jollett (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Steven Chen (guitar, keyboards), Adrian Rodriguez (electric bass, backing vocals), and Daren Taylor (drums).
Named after a section in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, the group is known for its blend of rock music and orchestral arrangements, having performed frequently with the Calder Quartet, a string quartet based in Los Angeles. The group has also played concerts with the Louisville Orchestra and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

Initially a writer and essayist, Jollett began seriously writing songs with an acoustic guitar following a week in March 2006, during which he underwent a break-up, learned his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, and was himself diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disease that led to the development of two cosmetic conditions: Alopecia areata and Vitiligo.

Prior to the formation of the band, and to supplement his fiction writing, Jollett supported himself as a freelance writer, contributing to NPR, Los Angeles Times, Filter and Men’s Health, among other organizations. Soon after the formation of the band, he concentrated only on fiction. 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.[3] In keeping with his literary background, Jollett named the band after a section of the postmodern novel White Noise by Don DeLillo,[4] 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. The band was born of a similar life-altering sequence of events, and thus, the themes of mortality and media consumption that arise from the novel’s toxic cloud serve as a major impetus for the band’s creative drive.