Team Sleep
w/ Phallucy
Sat Dec 15
B Complex

When insane mathcore duo Hella played at the Meow Meow a couple weeks ago, their drummer, Zach, told me about this project he's been working on, called Team Sleep. "It's Chino from the Deftones, Mike Patton, Mary Timony it's slow, sort of Mogwai-ish," he said.

I immediately had a freak-out, because Mary Timony (the airy vocalist and elf-prog guitarist from Helium) is my most FAVORITEST musician in the world, and I love ALL her projects (except for the Green 4 but I only saw them once and maybe they were having an off night).

Anyway, I immediately posted a message to the PDX Pop List, which is essentially a bunch of Portlanders geeking out over music on the computer: "MARY TIMONY, MIKE PATTON, ZACH FROM HELLA AND THE DUDE FROM THE DEFTONES ARE IN A BAND TOGETHER AND TOURING! OH MY GOD!"

This, my friends, is how rumors are started. You see the point of origin--you see how it spirals out of control. You see that the intentions are good, that the excitement is sincere, but there is still an element of mendacity involved, whether its purveyors are aware of it or not.

The fact is, Mary Timony and Mike Patton are NOT touring with Team Sleep, but they did some vocals on the record. The touring Team Sleep consists of Zach Hella, Chino Deftone, Todd Wilkinson, and DJ Crook. The record will be released early next year on Maverick Records.

Since I started the rumor, I was too humiliated to do the interview for this story, so the Mercury's Katie Shimer graciously talked to Todd about Team Sleep, even though no one had ever actually heard their music, and the entirety of the excitement behind the project has to do with the group's starpower.

So when Katie asked Todd what their music sounded like, Todd told Katie and Katie told me that he writes "stuff on guitar, and I would hook up with Crook, who writes beats. We use drum machines and guitars, pretty mellow." Then Katie told me that when she asked Todd if Deftones fans are going to be thrown off by the sound of Team Sleep, he said that he "thinks so, shit." And that he "hopes" so!

But then Steve, my editor-boss, told me that none of this interview made any sense, and that he wanted to know what Team Sleep sounds like. So I found some Team Sleep demos on the internet, and I told him they sound sort of gothic and eerie, with drum machine beats and isolated screeching guitars for dramatic effect. And this made a lot of sense, because Todd told Katie and Katie told me that he said, "Chino and I went to high school together; we grew up listening to all kinds of music--hiphop, the Cure."

But then Katie told me that Todd told her that even though Mary Timony sang on three songs for the Team Sleep album, he thought only one of them was going to be on the record! TRAVESTY OF TRAVESTIES! And that Todd also told her that he's "rarely played outside of [his] living room"! How the hell can a dude who has "rarely played outside his living room" just nonchalantly mention that two Mary Timony songs were being shamelessly omitted from a record?

I had to straighten this out, so I emailed Ben from Matador Records and demanded he tell me what Mary Timony was doing RIGHT THAT VERY SECOND! Don't tell anyone, okay--pinky swear--but Ben told me that "she's working on her record (which should be out sometime around April or May)!" THANK GOD! I feel so much better about everything now.