Menomena: Portland’s Friendly Monsters
By Bob Ham
Photos by Jason Quigley
Within the first few minutes of meeting the three members of Menomena, a decision has to be made: where to eat. All three bounce around ideas: a restaurant with a nickname unsuitable for print (deemed too noisy), a local fast food chain (shrugs all around), and just staying at the house where the band rehearses, eating whatever is in the cupboards (shuffling of feet from the more hungry members of the band). Finally, one brave soul announces that they will stay put and sate themselves on the house’s stash of granola bars, pistachios and oranges. As Brent Knopf (vocals/guitars/keyboards) settles into a rocking chair and begins peeling an orange, he looks up, smirks and says, “You just witnessed your first Menomena decision making process.”
Trying to get any group of people to come to any kind of consensus is probably the hardest thing to do. For the three guys in Menomena (Knopf, bassist Justin Harris, and drummer Danny Seim), the decisions they have to make as a band are becoming bigger and bigger. In early 2006, they decided to sign a contract with the heavyweight Seattle-based indie label Barsuk, who released the band’s third full-length, Friend and Foe, in late January. Now, the band is gearing up for their first headlining tour of the U.S. According to Seim, when it comes to decisions big and small, “there’s almost always disagreement. With the Barsuk signing, we didn’t really meet in the middle and say, ‘Yes, let’s do this right now.’ Nothing’s ever really like that with the band.”
Where the band does come to a consensus is with the music. On record, Menomena becomes a cohesive unit, working up jagged rhythms that they overlay with smatterings of dubbed-out bass, frittering keyboards, and the straining vocals of all three members of the group. The combination adds up to some of the most intricate and experimental pop songs to come out of the band’s hometown of Portland in years.
When it comes to the group’s live performance, the intricacies of their sounds can sometimes get lost in translation. “The main issue we’ve run into is sound adequacy,” says Harris. “Without traveling with your own sound person, you’re at the mercy of a particular venue’s sound person.”
 When the group is allowed to have their say on stage, the results can quite often be enrapturing, as Knopf and Harris bounce between playing a variety of instruments, creating gorgeous and complex walls of sound that would take other bands at least three times as many people to replicate. All the while, the long-limbed Seim keeps the entire band from veering off into no man’s land with beats that find the rare middle ground between the worlds of funk and indie rock.
For all the band’s experimental leanings, Menomena’s beginnings were much more middle-of-the-road than one would anticipate. Both Seim and Harris did time in a — in their words — “Pearl Jam-sounding” Christian rock group that played frequently at one of Portland’s few all-ages venues, The Push. It was there that the two were able to meet Knopf. “We were asked to open for our favorite band in the world [Poor Old Lu],” says Seim, “and we get to the show and it turns out the band canceled.”
Knopf, who was there to see the headliner, balked at sticking around until he was strong-armed into staying by the show’s promoter. “My friends and I paused outside the venue and [the promoter] came out and said, ‘What are you gonna do? Go to Shari’s and drink some coffee?’“ Knopf quickly became a fan of Seim and Harris’ band and, after getting to know them better, held out hope that they would ask him to join. His wish sort of came true after returning from college to find the band broken up. The three joined forces at the beginning of 2000 and, since then, have released two critically acclaimed discs for Film Guerrero — 2004’s I Am The Fun Blame Monster (whose rearranged letters spell out “the first Menomena album”) and the soundtrack to a dance piece, entitled Under An Hour, released early last year. They have also toured extensively throughout the United States.
Towards the end of their most recent tour, Menomena came home to Portland for a big homecoming/victory lap show at the art enclave, Disjecta. The crowd was virtually a who’s who of local musicians (including such imports as Gang of Four bassist Dave Allen and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock), as well as fans from all over the age spectrum that giddily yelled and clapped along to their set. Menomena, whose stage set-up includes a keyboard, xylophone, sampler, saxophones, Moog, bass, guitars and drums, played an energetic and fun set of music, overcoming the death of the sampler that normally accompanies them on almost every song with any number of melodic and discordant noises. Surprisingly, for a group that relies a great deal on technology to help reproduce its songs in a live setting, Menomena “hasn’t had any major technical problems [like that] in a while,” according to Harris. “In the beginning there were, as we were trying to figure stuff out, but the last few years we’ve been lucky.”
They seem even luckier when it comes to light that the band’s three full-length albums were self-recorded using digital technology and computer programs of their own devising. “Brent developed this recording program that allows us to simultaneously write and record loops that can then be restructured,” says Seim. “Once that happens, we start taking those sessions, jigsaw puzzle-style, and add vocals and melodies.”
The program, a digital looping recorder named Deeler, was created by Knopf to benefit a group that he says “doesn’t really get together that much” due to the three having to juggle families, day jobs, side projects (Seim has recently collaborated with Dave Allen and Tracker front man John Askew on a project called Faux-Hoax), and other creative outlets (Harris traveled to Australia at the end of 2005 to showcase an art installation).
As Seim notes, “We’ve never actually recorded together. What you’re hearing on the record is basically solo-recorded output. We’re never actually in the same room at the same time.” Such a recording style is reflected in many of the songs on the group’s new album, acting almost contrary to the current trend of throwing layer after layer onto a song by instead allowing the music a lot of breathing room and empty space.
 When the question comes up about the possibility of working with an outside producer, Knopf points out the benefits in the band’s laissez-faire approach to recording. “Being able to record at our leisure and at our own expense outweighs whatever vague benefit most bands would think they’d get by paying someone in a studio,” says Knopf. All three seem perfectly content to handle recording on their own. According to Harris, if having a producer ever became a possibility, it would again come down to the band being able to come to some kind of agreement. “Is it realistic to be able to find one person that all three of us could fully trust?” says Harris.
Although Menomena will go to great lengths to talk about the recording process and the method to their particular madness, where they will stop short is trying to explain away the often-cryptic lyrics that mark their songs. Knopf goes so far as to say, “When I write lyrics, it’s usually about something that’s puzzling me that I can’t figure out or something that I want to do but I can’t or something that I should be doing but I can’t get the courage to do.” Knopf also fears that trying to pin down the meaning of a song would reduce the possible number of meanings for listeners. “The last time I actually tried to use a metaphor to describe a song, I never lived it down.”
Menomena may not see eye to eye on any number of subjects, but when it comes to their hopes for the band, all three young men echo the same dedicated ideals. Knopf wants to make sure that the quality of their music continues to get better and better and says, “I would like us to make, in the next 10 years, six or seven more records that are better than the previous one. That’s what matters most to me.” From what the band has accomplished so far, and the sheer accomplishment of Friend and Foe, it would appear that they are well on their way.
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