When the Airborne Toxic Event took the stage at Spaceland in Silver Lake on January 31st of 2008, the 400-capacity venue was a madhouse. In the entryway, patrons squeezed in and pled their cases to the door girl. Another 400 people queued impatiently along the sidewalk outside, forming a massive line of a thousand people that snaked down Silver Lake Boulevard, surrounding the venue on all sides.

Two years earlier, Jollett was a writer working on his first novel when he experienced the worst week of his life. In a span of seven days, his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he in turn was diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disease, he and his long-term girlfriend broke up, and after camping out in the hospital for several days for his mother's surgery, he came down with pneumonia. Emerging from a month-long haze, 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.

Daren Taylor had recently moved back to Los Angeles from Fresno and was looking for something to do. The 26-year-old former punk drummer met Jollett through a friend, and after briefly quizzing one another on rock trivia and playing some songs together, the two promptly locked themselves in a small room in a warehouse in downtown L.A. and for the next four months, worked out beats and breaks, screaming into microphones, stomping, drinking, dancing and wailing into the night. They felt perhaps they were on to something.

Months went by, during which the two flirted with the idea of becoming a two-piece. Then they met Noah Harmon. Also a former punk rock acolyte, Harmon had recently earned a degree in jazz double bass from the California Institute of the Arts. Anna Bulbrook was next. A classically trained violinist from Boston, she met Jollett at a taco stand at two in the morning one night. Finally, Steven Chen, who knew Jollett from halcyon days in San Francisco when they were both part of the same clique of writers, was asked to come by the warehouse one afternoon and play something on the keyboard. He insisted instead on guitar. 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."

Such things happen every now and then. An idea takes hold, or a piece of music strikes a resonant chord and suddenly it seems the world is infinite, that something real can exist among the mind-numbing fray.The Airborne Toxic Event are neither icons, nor saviors, 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.Maybe the world is changing around them. Or maybe nothing ever changes and all anybody ever wanted was to hear was an honest song.