Dave Hofer spent the first 20 years of his life in the western suburbs of Chicago, catching the music bug at an early age thanks to an unusual combination of the Oldies radio station, his punk rock sister and metalheads at school that probably smoked cigarettes.

His "contributions" to underground music began in 1994 when he filled in on drums for his sisters' band at a YMCA and started to scratch his writing itch by contributing record reviews, interviews and poorly-written columns to local zines like Spontaneous Combustion and The Sound Interrupt.

After moving to The Big City (Chicago) in the early aughts, Hofer continued playing music and writing, starting as an intern for the now-defunct Punk Planet magazine and working his way up to Music Reviews Coordinator over the course of four years. Along the way, Hofer also freelanced for The Chicago Sun-Times, Metal Maniacs, Decibel, The Onion AV Club (Chicago) and several other small periodicals that didn't make it.

Additionally, in 2003 Hofer managed to land a job at Chicago’s oldest independent record store, Reckless Records. After three years of working his way up from Clerk, he was promoted to Product Buyer in 2006.

In February of 2008, during his second stint on tour selling merchandise for then-reunited grindcore legends Brutal Truth, Hofer developed the idea for his biography of bassist Dan Lilker, Perpetual Conversion, a six-year-long labor of love eventually published by Handshake, Inc, and released on Lilker's 50th birthday in October of 2014. The book was subsequently printed in Portuguese for the Brazilian market and Italian for, you guessed it, Italy.

Currently, Hofer is focusing on his DuPage County Hardcore archival project, which has grown to over 900 items since its inception in 2013.

Hofer graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a Master of Library and Information Science in 2023. His MLIS experience includes work in the Field Museum of Natural History’s Marie Louise Rosenthal Library, the Ryerson-Burnham Library Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Studs Terkel Radio Archive at WTTW/WFMT and the manuscript archive at the Chicago History Museum. He is currently working as a Project Archivist at the Art Institute of Chicago.