Telefon Tel Aviv

Telefon Tel Aviv began in 1999 as two New Orleans high school friends, Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper, carving micro-samples into arrangements that carried the shape of folk songwriting without any of its instruments. Their 2001 debut, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, sat at the meeting point of hip-hop, soul and electronic music, and every record after it moved somewhere the previous one had not: the vocal-led Map of What Is Effortless in 2004, then the cold synth-pop of Immolate Yourself in 2009, which reached number 17 on Billboard's dance/electronic chart. Cooper died two days after that album's release, and the project went silent for a decade. Eustis, now based in Los Angeles, has continued alone, returning in 2019 with Dreams Are Not Enough while building a parallel career as a producer, film composer and touring musician for Nine Inch Nails, Puscifer and A Perfect Circle, and running the rhythm-dismantling duo Second Woman with Turk Dietrich. The catalogue is small. Its influence is not.