Jimmy Tamborello Makes Beautiful Techno

For three decades now, pop music’s muse has hung out at San Marcos High. In the 1980s, she anointed the jangly Toad the Wet Sprocket boys; the ’90s saw her favoring Parry Gripp’s punk-flavored Nerfherder. This year, the Royals’ serial blessing falls on a surprisingly soft-spoken alum who in April played the preeminent stage of this generation’s rock dreams: headlining the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival’s Main Stage as part of The Postal Service. In a way, he’s part of a nostalgia act. After all, aside from a couple of previously unreleased tracks, the band hasn’t released new material in 10 years; their current tour is in support of the reissue of their lone studio output, Give Up, which in 2004 became the Sub Pop label’s second-best-selling album of all time. It also spawned a hit, a spot on Garden State’s ubiquitous movie soundtrack, and scads of covers by other troubadours and bands.

In another way, though, it’s a most ripe moment for The Postal Service to revisit fame. Essentially a side project for three acclaimed artists, the band’s reputation has only grown in its silent years. Besides headlining Coachella and Lollapalooza in Chicago, this year’s whistle stops include Red Rocks in Colorado and the Greek Theater in Berkeley. They play the Santa Barbara Bowl this Saturday, July 20. In semi-retirement, The Postal Service became a sum bigger than its glowing parts, which famously include Ben Gibbard, star vocalist of pop phenom Death Cab for Cutie; Jenny Lewis, the alt-country heroine who fronted Rilo Kiley; and, last but not least, Jimmy Tamborello, an electronic-pop-music pioneer who some critics claim changed the face of indie rock with his seminal (and now ancient) album, Life Is Full of Possibilities, under the name Dntel. He’s also a guy (San Marcos Class of ’92) from a real nice family straight outta Goleta, California.

“It’s nerve-wracking,” Tamborello admitted earlier this year, imagining himself onstage at Coachella over lunch somewhere between Glendale and Griffith Park. “On our last tour, we played little 200-people places,” he recalled. Coachella audiences number in the tens of thousands. Though he’s lived in Los Angeles since leaving S.B. for college in the late 1990s, and though he moves through the rock world with seeming ease, Tamborello doesn’t come off at all the stage-strutting rocker. Rather, his low-key, circumspect manners seem more suited to studious pursuits, and, like most working musicians, he spends a lot of time alone. He isn’t escaped from a lone and filthy garret, though. He shares a house with his girlfriend, who works as a production manager in Hollywood. “I used to be a night owl, but more and more, I’ve been writing music during the day,” he explained. “She comes home in the evening, and I like to be finished working when she does — unless I’m really involved in something.” Tamborello’s kinda day job is both solitary and public; he hosts a weekly Internet radio show on dublab (a nonprofit collective hyping itself as “future roots radio”), where he spins techno on a program he calls Dying Sounds. In one email, he said he didn’t much enjoy performing his solo act, Dntel, in front of a crowd because he doesn’t enjoy “playing” a laptop. However, he admits to loving it when the audience is present and engaged, as they often are during occasional shows at the Los Angeles techno-haven Low End Theory in Lincoln Heights.