Menomena

A conversation with Justin Harris

(January 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Photograph by Alicia J. Rose

Yep, they're that good.  After wowing listeners with 2003's I Am the Fun Blame Monster!, it seemed that Menomena would lose their element of surprise - until they released an instrumental score for an avant-garde dance company in their adopted home of Portland.  Now, on one of the most crowded and fantastic Tuesday release days in recent memory, they make their triumphant return to a "proper" record with Friend and Foe, an album that shares some characteristics with the work of fellow forward-looking peers like Akron/Family and TV on the Radio, but winds up existing entirely in its own terrain.  The trio [guitarist/saxophonist Justin Harris, drummer Danny Seim and vocalist/guitarist/computer master Brent Knopf] are often mentioned alongside their unofficial fourth member, a program called Deeler that loops their creative sessions together and allows for easy accessing and archiving.  Those mechanics are interesting, but pale in comparison to the organic end results.

Right before the release of Friend and Foe, Justin Harris took some time to talk with The Red Alert about the new record, its difficult transition from record to stage, and the album artwork that is a masterpiece in its own right.

Does the pre-release buzz make it more exciting and more nerve-wracking, or does that stay off your radar?

I wish I could say it stayed off our radar.  It’s a little of both; nerve-wracking because it makes having to learn the songs and play them well live that much more important.  Not that it wouldn’t be anyway  (laughs)  But it’s exciting, and it’s part of why we do this:  to spread it around.  Hopefully that happens.

When’s the big release show up there in Portland?

It’s on the 28th.

Then you get a little break before you set off on the road.

Yeah.  At the very beginning of February, we’re playing up in Seattle and Vancouver, then we don’t head out again until the first week of March.

How much consideration is put into finding the right release date?  Obviously there’s a vortex around the holidays, but there are a ton of good bands with albums out on the 23rd.  Coincidence, or is there something in the tea leaves?

I’m not totally sure.  For ADA-distributed bands, I think that the 23rd is the first major release date.  I think ADA distributes most of the bands that you’re talking about, I think if you didn’t release in 2006, it’s your first major release date.  When we first realized how many other bands were releasing on the same day, we thought, “Oh.  Great.”  (laughs)  Initially, Barsuk was toying with the idea of releasing our idea in November, more as an experiment than anything else.  Apparently no indie labels release albums in November or December.  I’m not really sure what that is; you’d think people would want that for Christmas or whatever.  They decided not to, though, and I think that was a wise decision.  Plus, we didn’t have it quite done in time for them to do what they needed to do with it.

Did you have a heavy sense of expectation coming into this album?  Did you consciously want to outdo the last record, or were you able to brush aside those expectations?

Luckily, I think we were able to brush that aside, though we always want to progress and push our personal boundaries.  I think self-motivation is probably more of a motivator than anything else.  It’s funny to talk to people who have strong opinions and tell us, “Oh, this is much better than your last one,” because we may not necessarily think that, you know.  (laughs)  We’re so tied to the process, and that alone is enough to skew and distort your view of what the music actually sounds like.  We finished this record on the first of September, basically, and I’m just now to the point where I can listen to it objectively, and I’m getting over the critical stage where the only things I hear are mistakes.  It’s good to hear the songs and not the trouble that went into it.

I’m interested in your songwriting process.  Obviously the Deeler stuff is interesting, but I think readers can find that pretty well explained elsewhere.  I was more curious about how the three of you go off individually and work on the songs independently, then come together and cobble it all together.  First of all, is that an accurate simplification of what goes on?

Yeah, it is.  And I appreciate your not wanting to talk about Deeler.  (laughs)  That whole thing, for some odd reason, has been blown way out of proportion.  I guess it is worth mentioning that Deeler… people will assume that Deeler is this matrixing program where we throw these loops into it and it arranges the songs for us.  That’s not the case; it’s just basically a storage device.  When we’re all playing live instruments and recording them via microphone, all Deeler does is store them in an order based on loops.  It’s nothing really more than that.  A lot of the stuff that’s on the new album is spawned from Deeler sessions that we did in 2001 and 2002.  And, obviously, there are more current ones, too.  But, yeah, we’ll go back through those and if something catches one of our ears, we’ll start a song based on that session and take different ideas from that session and work around them or work with them—or maybe not work with them at all, but will have it spark a different idea.  We more or less do the writing and arranging separately, but the good thing about that is that we are still using each other’s instrumentation.  I have all these loops where it’s still Danny playing drums, and then there’s a point where we come back together and share it with each other and cross-pollinate and put our hands in each other’s songs.

When do the lyrics and vocals come in, then?

I think it’s different for each song.  For the ones that I’m more or less responsible for, it can happen in the middle or in the end.  The melody is usually spawned from something in those Deeler sessions.  But the final product is pretty much all re-recorded; there are very few of the original loops used in this album.  Fun Blame Monster had a lot more original Deeler loops in it, because sometimes there’s no way we can reproduce the sound of a certain loop.  Sometimes we’ll get these drum tones that blow my mind with just one mic pointed randomly at the drum set.

Around the time that Fun Blame Monster came out, Danny said that you guys were hoping that your next album – this album – would be easier to translate to stage.  Do you think that’s how it ended up playing out?

(laughs)  Well, unfortunately, we didn’t win that one.  This has been areal challenge, learning these songs to play live.  It’s funny he would say that, because I think we were all thinking that last time.  But on Fun Blame Monster, the final recorded versions of the songs are representations of how we ultimately learned to play them live.  We had been playing those songs for a year before we recorded the album, so we already had a pretty firm grasp on how to play them.  This time around, that’s not the case.  There’s really only one song, “Evil Bee,” that we’ve been playing live.  I don’t think any of us were consciously thinking about how we were going to pull them off live while were writing them, which has, in turn, made for a difficult learning curve.  But it is coming together.

Well, you have a little bit of time.

Yeah, we do. 

I know you guys have played with a lot of great bands over the years, including a few like The Long Winters and Pink Mountaintops who have been interview guests here in the past.  Do you still find yourself on ill-matched bills occasionally?

No, not usually.  My personal opinion is that it doesn’t really matter to me what other bands are playing with us, or whether we match with their music, so long as people are coming to the show and enjoying it.  However, when we went out with The Long Winters and What Made Milwaukee Famous – first off, they’re great guys, some of the nicest people ever – but we were joking around a lot, and we would always be considered this weird jazz-art avant-garde band.  We’re maybe not as straightforward as The Long Winters, but it’s not like we’re a bunch of weirdoes who are mostly playing kazoos.  We’re kind of just thrown into that category of “fringe art-rock,” which is strange.

Let’s shift gears to album artwork, because that’s a hang-up of mine and of course it’s something that is mentioned pretty frequently with Menomena.  People are predicting that physical albums are an endangered species.  Do you think they’ll become a collector’s item, or do you have a more optimistic perspective?

I do have a more optimistic perspective.  Album art, traditionally, has been another way to make something compelling.  I think the tangible aspect of album art should be considered.  If there’s any threat of it becoming extinct, it’s because that’s become a group mentality, like “Oh, whatever, it doesn’t matter what the art looks like – it’s just a vehicle to hold the CD.”  That’s killing the whole side of holding a physical, tangible object in your hands.  All three of us are in the same boat, and we do try to take the opportunity to make it worthwhile for someone to buy it rather than download it.  I personally don’t buy a lot of music.  I’m one of those very picky music listeners.  But when I do buy the albums, I’m often disappointed by the album art.  It’s another opportunity to captivate the listener, and it’s something that you have to do, anyway, so why not capitalize on the opportunity to make something special?

How did Craig Thompson wind up doing the artwork for Friend and Foe?  Is he a friend of the band?

Yeah, he is.  He’s a super nice guy—and what an immense talent.  We actually were just going to have him do the single, the “Wet and Rusting” EP, then that led into having him do the drawing for the album.  Brent had this idea of having these die cuts that were just eyes, and it would be a bunch of eyes following you wherever you turned the CD.  That was interesting, but Craig took that and said, “What if we had different shapes and little guts?” and he just went for it.  I’m still pretty blown away by the end result.

How long did you guys spend in the bathtub to get the right press shot?

(laughs)  We were in there for a bit.  There were a lot to choose from.