Danny Seim began the Lackthereof project in 1997. His other band Menomena started as a side project in 2000, and took over because Seim felt less self-conscious as a drummer than as a singer-songwriter.

Menomena discovered a way to keep intra-band fistfights to a minimum when Knopf designed Digital Loop Recorder (a/k/a Deeler), a computer program that keeps track of the band's musical bits and transforms songwriting into an egalitarian process. First the musicians take turns playing hooks on various instruments and filing them away on the computer, essentially recording the building blocks for dozens of tracks at once. Later on, they toy with the parts, maybe pairing a whistled melody with saxophone barks and rumbling toms, until they have a batch of peacefully assembled songs. [Read More]