Thursday, September 30, 2010

Menomena

I have the strangest ways of finding new music. For example - My thought process this morning...

"Oh! I have an e-mail. I wonder what it is! Oh, look at that...Ticketmaster AND 930 Club concert dates and ticket prices, let's see if anything is worth looking into. Bah, Ticketmaster is all sale concerts and shit I'm not interested in. AGH, even worse, the only 930 show I want to go to I can't because I'm going to ANOTHER concert that night. *about to click out of email* Wait a sec, Menomena? That sounds kinda cool, let's read the blurb. Experimental rock!? Don't mind if I do!"

After a few minutes of listening, then a few more minutes, then another 5 songs after that I've come to the conclusion that I'm obsessed with them and thier CD, Friend and Foe, which released back in 2007. And APPARENTLY, lucky for me, they have just released another album June 2010, Mines, that I have to look into.

After some searching and maybe slight stalking, this is what I have found - Menomena is an "experiemental rock band" from Portland, OR who got thier start when one of the band members programmed a digital looping recorder, packaged their songs up in the form of a flip book of the band playing live, and then released themselves (called I Am The Fun Blame Monster!) - wtf, on a freakin laptop!

I also found this cool blurb -
The band uses a com­puter pro­gram called the Dig­i­tal Loop­ing Recorder, or Deeler for short, in the song writ­ing process — it was pro­grammed by band mem­ber Brent Knopf. Drum­mer Danny Seim explains the process, “First, we set the tempo of the click, which is played through a pair of head­phones. We then take turns pass­ing a sin­gle mic around the room. One of us will hold the mic in front of an instru­ment, while another one of us will lay down a short impro­vised riff over the click track. We usu­ally start with the drums. Once the drums begin loop­ing, we throw on some bass, piano, gui­tar, bells, sax, or what­ever other sort of noise­maker hap­pens to be in the room. Deeler keeps the process demo­c­ra­tic, which is the only way we can operate”.


Anyway, have a listen. I am loving them and their weird, quirky, off-beat sound.


My My

Muscle n Flow

The Pelican

And another from their new album - Five Little Rooms

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