Jeff Tobias – Music from Milky Way Underground

released August 18th, 2023 on cassette and digital formats

While best known for his searing saxophone playing in bands like Sunwatchers, Modern Nature, and Thee Reps, Jeff Tobias has been busy composing for soundtracks, and his new release Music from Milky Way Underground is the first album to document this side of Jeff’s work.

Previous recordings of Jeff’s compositions (2022’s chamber-pop tour de force Recurring Dream, 2016’s Some) showed his comfort in both minimalist and maximalist palettes. In recent years, Jeff has expanded his circle of collaborators to include theater artists and podcast producers. For Music for Milky Way Underground, he was tasked with helping to illustrate a fantastical, dreamlike quietude that sprung forth from potential real-life tragedy.

Milky Way Underground is a 16-episode fiction podcast that premiered in 2021 on the TRAX imprint of PRX. MWU was written and directed by Grant Stewart, a close friend of Jeff’s going back twenty years to when they lived in Athens, Georgia. Grant’s concept for Milky Way Underground originated from recently-experienced trauma: doctors had discovered an unruptured aneurysm affixed to Grant’s brain, leading to a series of frightening surgeries that threatened both his life and his ability to communicate. Inspired by this experience, Grant created Milky Way Underground, which follows two teenage siblings on a fantastical adventure to an otherworldly place where language and light are rendered askew. Featuring acting cameos from John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats) and Julian Koster (Neutral Milk Hotel), Milky Way Underground is emotionally resonant even as it follows its own dreamlike logic.

Given the gravity of his close friend’s brush with mortality, Jeff set out to honor Grant’s fictionalized exploration of this strange and scary experience. Music from Milky Way Underground seeks to channel the dichotomy between calm and unease, never far from the possibility of silence. The music draws inspiration from Japanese ambient music (“Snow”), West Coast jazz arrangements (“Upbeat”), and the inescapable influence of the maestro Angelo Badalamenti (“Lament”). The second side of the cassette release showcases the seventeen-minute meditation “Flashbacks,” a patient and warm exploration of simple chords and tremolo-drenched saxophone.