Mikel Jollett – District Consonance

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. –Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”

A spectral bird, its wings outspread, imparts a white glow to the dim stage. The sculptural eagle — a spirit animal of sorts for The Airborne Toxic Event — recalls Klee’s angel, and the music of The Airborne Toxic Event evokes the struggle with the chaos of modern life described by the historian Walter Benjamin. But unlike Benjamin’s angel of history, confronted with the devastation of the past but propelled inexorably into the future, the music of The Airborne Toxic Event encourages us to linger, to rebuild these stunning ruins and piece together the fragments of our compartmentalized lives.

Continue reading “A storm blowing from Paradise: A night with the Airborne Toxic Event”

In storytelling, it’s all about the secrets. If you start with, “it was a rainy day at the beach,” I will just fall asleep. I want to know what happens at the bar when it’s 1 a.m. and you’re five pints in and telling your best friend about something that’s really happened. That’s where the good stuff is.

I like Mikel Jollett’s description of the “good stuff” and where it comes from. The lead singer of the Airborne Toxic Event is no stranger to plumbing the depths of souls and surfacing with a story — before he became a songwriter, he was a Stanford psychology major and a writer (with a short story published in McSweeney’s). Three albums in, the Airborne Toxic Event has shown what kind of magic can happen when a wordsmith starts a rock band with his drummer friend (Daren Taylor), a classically-trained violinist (Anna Bulbrook), a jazz bassist (Noah Harmon), and a guitarist (Steven Chen) who Mikel met when both lived in San Francisco. Even before delving into the songs, you get a sense of the literary cred from the name of the band — it’s out of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (and I think this is inspiration, not pretension).

Continue reading “The Airborne Toxic Event: Hell and Back”