Portland’s Music Millennium has many great free shows, but tomorrow night’s might be the best of the year so far. It’s going to be packed for sure, but I’ve heard that if you buy the Menomena album beforehand you have a guaranteed seat.
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From Press Release:
*RECORD RELEASE EVENT!*
*MENOMENA*
*FREE LIVE PERFORMANCE*
*Music Millennium – 3158 East Burnside 503-231-8926*
*Tuesday, July 27th 6:00 PM*
Menomena formed in late 2000, when Brent Knopf graduated from Dartmouth College and returned to Portland to collaborate with Justin Harris and Danny Seim. They played their first show in July 2001, at The Meow Meow, a now-defunct all ages venue in Portland.
The band’s name was chosen for “the way it rolls off the tongue, sexually, or something” and has no specific meaning, although it is often assumed to refer to the Piero Umiliani song “Mah Nà Mah Nà”, a staple of The Muppet Show. A recent audioclip from SpotDJ had Brent stating that the band name was a contraction of the words “Men” and “Phenomena”. This is most likely a joke.
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”.
They self-released their debut album, I Am the Fun Blame Monster!, in 2003. The album was elaborately packaged in an 80-page flipbook that Seim designed and individually hand-assembled. In 2005, Under an Hour was released as a three-track album of instrumental music written for and performed with Monster Squad, an experimental dance company based in Portland. Menomena released their next album in 2007, titled Friend and Foe. It received relative critical acclaim — while some websites like Pitchfork Media praised the album for its effective modular pop, others like PopMatters criticized it for presenting a sense of feigned maturity.
Menomena’s newest work, Mines, comes after a period of significant upheaval that has left them with no shortage of new ideas, and this album is as good or better than anything they’ve done to-date. In the wake of brutal disagreements, unrelenting grudges and failed marriages (not to mention a world full of modern terrorism, natural disasters and economic collapse) Menomena is still standing, and has made an album that many are already saying defines the state of intelligent pop music one decade into the millennium.
