Scene Report: EQUALIZER presented by Heterodox Records – No Fun Bar
Show: EQUALIZER presented by Heterodox Records
Venue: No Fun Bar – 1709 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, Oregon.
The show I saw on Saturday night was the Equalizer show presented by Heterodox Records at No Fun Bar on Hawthorne in Portland. No Fun Bar is a small venue. Cramped? Sure. Half the time it feels like you’re waiting to be crammed into a human shipping container. But pack that place with a buzzing, half-feral electronic crowd, and suddenly the claustrophobia flips into something intense and deeply satisfying – like being buried alive with a really good sound system.
Plus, they’ve got a sister business next door called The Devil’s Dill, and sweet merciful hell, they make the kind of sandwiches that feel like they came from an alternate timeline where human taste buds actually evolved correctly. I’m not convinced the owner didn’t strike some unholy pact at a crossroads for the recipes. Probably traded a soul for a balsamic aioli. Either way, I was already plotting my late-night sandwich conquest before the first bassline dropped. In the meantime, I ordered fries and a lager to soak up the anticipation and stave off my hunger like I was laying down sandbags before a flood.
I’ve covered Heterodox Records plenty over at Micro Genre Music – dug into their catalogs, crawled through their releases like a ghost exploring the the backroom. Caught a few words with Ramon Mills, the chief architect behind HTX, and he let slip that there’s a new All The Stores Are Closed release dropping on Bandcamp Friday. It was about that time Enzo Casanova showed up – right then I knew it was going to be a full house.
First up tonight was –ist – formerly of the outfit ISM. Before a single note blasted out, I knew we were in for it. The man had IKEA table legs bolted onto a hardcase full with gear, like he’d raided a suburban living room and then weaponized it – very 2025.
He stood there preparing while a lurking large glass of water and what was almost certainly hard liquor in a much smaller, more suspicious glass than the other were all perched precariously close to a mess of wires, synths, and blinking hardware. Confidence in its purest form: bring the storm, risk the short circuit, trust the machine gods. When -ist finally pulled the trigger, there was no warming up. Deep bass hits shook me, while liquid melodies – not soft, not ambient, but industrial-adjacent – started to ooze and crackle through the system. I felt it in my bones. And right about then – the moment when the sound hit critical mass – they arrived. The crowd, out of nowhere. Engulfing me. Packing in tight like we were all hitching a ride on the same haunted freight train. As the bodies stacked up, so did the beats—rolling and relentless. Rolling thunder is more appropriate – the storm that’s always incoming. Just when you think it has passed, it boomerangs back – full fucking force. Where the hell did all these people come from? Blame Enzo Caselnova. As the set wound down, I caught Cyclop Toad lurking nearby, seemingly indoctrinating Fitnezz into some secret society … or maybe he was just saying, “hello?” Couldn’t tell – you can never tell with Toad. And -ist? An absolute gem of a set. Rough, elegant, devastating in all the right ways. Also, I think it was their birthday – so happy birthday, -ist. Enjoy another glorious year marooned here with the rest of us in this beautifully fading republic.
Our old comrade Arson Rivvers was back on visual duty tonight, manning the flickering gates of perception like some half-mad sorcerer with a hard drive full of dangerous spells. As always, he brought the heat – but this time, the setting gave him an even sharper blade to work with. No Fun Bar might be a fucking shoebox, but tucked inside that box is a gorgeous projection screen behind the artists. Full-blown sensory hijack. But this time he gave different themes to each of the artists. Arson’s visuals for -ist seemed to be about the dangers of the internet – you know, “Would you download a car?” And we all say in unison, “In this economy? Yes.” Later on, during Traffichre’s set, the whole aesthetic shifted gears. No bright neon. No cartoon chaos. Instead: minimalism. Dark grays. Shapeshifting pixels undulating like something breathing just beneath the screen. Pretty masterful stuff. Catch a little sampler of his madness at the bottom of this article. Bottom line: Arson’s visuals bring another dimension to each one of these performances.
I don’t know what it is about the first set of any I show I go to, but I always need a breather. Overstimulation is a stim all in itself sometimes. So I took a few minutes to stumble outside, sucking down lungfuls of that unseasonably cool late-April air. Crisp by any normal standard, but here in Portland, it’s just par for the course. Somewhere in that fog of recalibration, I caught the first few sonic tendrils of Traffichre’s set slithering out the door. I hustled back to my cozy little chair inside, right where I needed to be, ready to let the next wave hit.
Ever been to a haunted house in space? Well, welcome to the freakshow. What Traffichre delivered was somewhere between ambient techno and minimal ambient, depending on how fried your brain was when you tried to label it. It’s a fool’s game anyway. What matters is this: it worked and it was splendid. And apparently this was their first live set. You wouldn’t know it by listening to the textured descent into deep space claustrophobia. It was a perfect follow-up to -ist‘s set. Traffichre brought the temperature down without killing the pulse. It gave me Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror vibes, but not in the way you might be thinking.
Deep, lush pads, but twisted. It wasn’t music for space travel. It was the soundtrack you hear in your mind after you’ve been lost in space too long – when the ship’s dead and the stars look like they’re laughing at you. Hints of cinematic dread, too – very John Carpenter. Before the set, I talked to Traffichre briefly and they mentioned they’re considering a name shift to Mano Sinistra. Apparently, that means “the left hand of the devil.” Fitting, both for the music and the venue, which already feels like it was built to host small-scale pacts with dark forces. I’m looking forward to whatever they cook up next.
Next up was Joel Noct, and by then the night was already teetering on the edge of something bottomless. I talked to Joel before his set – caught him in that rare calm-before-the-storm headspace – and he started regaling me with tales about spending every summer of his youth at Callaway Gardens in Georgia. I wasn’t ready for that. Callaway Gardens, if you don’t know, is like walking through a weaponized diorama of American Nostalgia. I’ve been there myself – enough times to know it smells like honeysuckle, capitalism, and slow decay. It’s pretty, sure, but it’s also a monument to a dying empire, selling dreams by the acre. Hearing Joel talk about it suddenly made all the pieces click into place. No wonder his music sounds like the soundtrack to a civilization on life support. Right before his set, Joel hit us with a sonic boom – a teeth-rattling, gut-churning blast that felt entirely deliberate, like firing a starter pistol in a crowded room just to see who flinches. It worked. Heads snapped to attention. No more small talk. No more half-drunk wandering.
When Joel’s set started, the night just felt personal. Noct’s set put me in a weird mood – the smoke machine, Traffichre’s set and Arson’s insane visuals behind him didn’t help. Now this is dark ambient. The crowd was rowdy and the music seemed to be egging these children on. Huh – how very 1950s of me. Then the beats came in – and not gently. Dark Ambient Techno. Like someone winding up for a gut punch and taking out your whole rib cage instead. Beat after beat, relentless, no doubt the handiwork of that Moog DFAM I saw him working with. How long could this crowd be so rowdy? Don’t care anymore. Immersed in the music. Then all of a sudden the crowd started to shift; away from their rowdiness and into actually feeling. One beer too deep, one synth blast too far inside their bloodstream – they were feeling it. This shit was personal. High bar for the final set.
It was about that moment SLTHR lurched over to my table and handed me a SLTHR sticker. No words, no explanation. Just a quick nod, a glint in the eye, and then he vanished back to the bar like a ghost who had better things to do. Thanks, SLTHR. It was also at this moment I realized that I was too full of french fries and beer to order a the mythical Devil’s Dill sandwich – so the sticker helped distract me from that sad realization.
The last set of the evening was Fitnezz. House techno was the final weapon of choice, and honestly, it made a vicious kind of sense. An appropriate way to end things – and there was no delay between sets. One second I’m wallowing in existential dread, contemplating the slow collapse of civilization under the flashing lights, and the next second the floor’s alive with bodies dancing like the world hadn’t been on fire for decades. Psychopaths, the lot of them. Beautiful, sweaty psychopaths. But maybe they had the right idea. Nostalgia is flooding the background with Arson’s visuals. Yes, forget the wars. Forget the rent due Monday. Dance, goddamn it. Dance and forget. Just when the techno overwhelms you, you’re pulled back by luscious pads and subtle backbeats; with bass hits buried like landmines under the surface. Back to earth for a bit, even if its only the stratosphere. It wasn’t vanilla. It wasn’t safe. But it pleased the crowd in the way a cold beer pleases someone stranded in the desert. And when you’re lost at sea at the end of a night like this, sometimes that’s all you can ask for.
The night was a breath of fresh air and for us lucky enough to witness a show like this, it was a reminder that the weird, beautiful heart of electronic music is alive and thriving even between the smoke, the basslines, and the bruised moonlight crawling over Hawthorne. A brilliant showcase by Heterodox Records of some great electronic musicians of the Pacific Northwest.
