Scene Report: EQUALIZER presented by Heterodox Records at NO FUN (7.26.25)
Event: EQUALIZER presented by Heterodox Records
Venue: NO FUN – 1709 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR
Mark the date – July 26, 2025. The official hangover day of the Portland music scene. It’s that time of summer when everyone has been going really hard – you’ve got a full-time job and a part-time obsession with catching every act because it’s summer, damnit. Too many nights, too many lineups, too many back-to-back sets bleeding into 3 a.m. And it’s not the weekend shows that finish you, it’s the Wednesday detours and the Thursday commitments you didn’t plan for but couldn’t skip. By Saturday, your brain is soup. This is when it’s important, in your darkest moments, to remember that the venue you’re going to tonight has the best sandwiches in all of Portland. Have no fear, the Devil’s Dill will get us through this.
If everyone is emotionally hungover, they’re all doing a hell of a job of getting through it, because just about everyone from the scene is here tonight. Every last one of them, packed into the room with that half-haunted look that comes from riding the line between burnout and bliss. I’ve often described NO FUN bar’s atmosphere like being buried alive with a really good sound system – it’s a small venue. But it’s nice to be surrounded by such good people in this coffin.
This is the 7th EQUALIZER event put on by Heterodox Records. I’ve been to a few, but these shows always fail to disappoint. Tonight’s lineup is strange, but in the best sense, with Ivan Jan opening the floodgates. I’ve seen Ivan drifting through the fog of bodies at shows like Live in the Depths in the past, but had no idea they were a musician until this exact moment. Their set opened and, honestly, it was giving How To Destroy Angels. Deep and pre-modulated beats that lined up every other sonic detail with grim precision. And the breakbeats, my goodness, the breakbeats. Just when things settled into a low, grimy groove, it melted into a smoke-stained jazz lounge for about two minutes until shifting mercilessly into Techno. SPINES, a local techno freak sitting next to me, was very happy with that shift in direction. This was a great opening set and I’d tag Ivan Jan here if I could find them in the digital wasteland, but they remain untraceable. But check out some of their performance below.
It was in between sets that I started to survey that madness around me – it was sandwich madness. Like I mentioned in my previous scene report at NO FUN, Devil’s Dill makes the best sandwiches in Portland. So what you have is a bunch of emotionally hungover electronic music mutants chowing down while basking in the beats. Wet Mango, a wizard of rhythm and noise who was also sitting next to me, absolutely destroyed the No. 8 – a meatloaf sandwich. That’s meatloaf, people. On a sandwich. Across the floor, I clocked Occurian turning his No. 5 into a makeshift salad – some kind of sandwich deconstruction ritual, a gesture toward health in the middle of this electronic-drenched chaos.
Next up was Baglady and the interesting thing about their set was that all of their gear sat on this breakaway table with wobbly legs. The legs bowed with every twist of the knobs – it seems liked a precarious altar to the gods of experimental chaos. Every movement of the table gave me a twinge of anxiety. It’s like you’re watching someone do something that looks dangerous but then some experienced spirit sitting on your right shoulder reminds you that they know what they’re doing. The music was pretty intense. Abstract rhythms clawed their way out of the monitors like wet, blinking things. A couple of these lines sound like what happens when you point a radio telescope at a celestial object. Just signals bouncing off the frozen carcasses of one of Jupiter’s lesser moons. In fact, a couple of these sounds reminded me of the signal that SETI intercepted from the Vegans (of Vega, not vegans) in that movie Contact. Absolutely killer set.
As soon as the music ended without missing a beat, I looked across my table and asked Production Unit Xero (showrunner) and their partner Bex what kind of sandwiches they had tonight. Bex had the No. 9, some kind of vegetarian sorcery involving cheese, asparagus, and tomato jam. PUX had taken the meatloaf route, same as Wet Mango. Meat slab between bread. No frills. Just the sustenance required to pilot an event like this through the vortex of a Portland summer night.
No time for that, SLTHR was up next. I recall asking SLTHR earlier in the evening what kind of set they were going to play and they directed me to a mission statement on their Youtube Channel. Classic SLTHR. But whatever questions I had about SLTHR’s set were answered pretty quickly. Every hit, and come to think it, every snare cracked like a goblin’s war cry. With that combo, every beat clanged like rusted steel dropped into the guts of an underground lair. You remember that scene in Bloodsport where Frank Dux and Jackson are playing that weird karate arcade game, and every move triggers a bizarre digitized scream? That’s what some of these hits sounded like. The set quieted down a bit and SPINES, slouched beside me, looked half-dead – probably a sandwich induced coma. They had the No. 4 – red wine-braised beef with onions, peppers and horseradish aioli. But then SLTHR snapped the chain again and the hard beats kicked in. SPINES reanimated in an instant. SPINES lives. Good beats makes happy feets, even if those beats are the war cry of goblins. SLTHR’s music is officially in the Goblincore category.
After finding out what kind of sandwich our good friend Enzo Caselnova had tonight (“The Special” – Griddled Smoked Ham, Melted Gouda, Apple-Ginger Chutney & Dressed Arugula), I turned to Production Unit Xero & Wet Mango to ask them what kind of set they would be playing at next month’s Live in the Depths. PUX turned to Wet Mango. Wet Mango returned the look to PUX. Then PUX looked back at me and said, “About 170 BPM.” Wet Mango, with the timing of a vaudeville act, raised an eyebrow and replied, “Oh really? I’m going to do about 160 BPM.” Question answered. Don’t forget to check out that show next month.
The last act of the night was Badrich and god damn can he snarl. When you paint with sound at that velocity, you’re bound to get splatter, and splatter it did. The BPM varies but the sonicity (yes, that’s a real word) is like a gallery of gunshots. Badrich drips with bass drops and far off explosions, – depth charges rolled off the subwoofers like they were hunting U-boats in your chest cavity. We descend into deep chasms, down past the foundations and we finally hear the screams of a lofty mechanical chorus – a thunder ricocheting off crystal battleships. Pretty insane set to conclude the evening, but I was really into it.
If tonight has taught me anything, it’s this: there’s still something sacred about dragging your ragged bones into the night, even when your heart’s held together by duct tape only getting by on the whisper of the wind carrying you from one place to the next. The world outside – this frothing, lunatic country of ours – doesn’t hold a candle to the raging fire of real community and breaking bread with the ones we care for. We’re weird, we’re queer, we’re tired as hell, but we’re all still here – just eating good food with our friends and enjoying some of the best music and culture that Portland has to offer. Great show.
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