Scene Report: HARDWARE at Process PDX
Event: HARDWARE
Venue: Process PDX – 5040 SE Milwaukie Ave, Portland, OR
HARDWARE first took shape in the dim, tangled heart of Northeast Portland. What began as a small collaborative session of local musicians – also known as Second Saturday – grew into something so large, that a kind of mitosis took place. What began as one room filled with voltage and pure collaboration now echoes across multiple spaces, all humming with the same wild intent. HARDWARE is a study in instinct, immersion, and collaboration through sound. It draws its breath from the old ways of improvisational Jazz – the kind played in smoke-thick rooms (more on this later), where musicians gathered not for any kind of spectacle, but for a kind of communion. HARDWARE carries that spirit forward of those great innovators, who at the height of their careers, collaborated with other musicians chasing the truth in the moment. Spontaneity. Collaboration. Truth in motion. That’s HARDWARE.
But let’s talk about the venue for a second. Process has that unassuming exterior that I’ve come to find most comforting when arriving for an electronic show. Depressing metal facade & window units plugged into the wall like the building is on life support – my kind of place. When you enter, you’re greeted by fucky geometry. No, seriously, the chairs and tables are shaped like trapezoids and parallelograms. It seems to be designed to fuck with people whose drugs are just kicking in or just beginning to wear off. But to me, the real all-star of the evening was the lighting on the dance floor. Joel Noct (who performed tonight) noted that Process reminded him of the club Tech Noir in Terminator 1. I’d have to agree with him, minus the Hollywood effect of light within light. No, the light here was paler indeed than moonlight ailing in some slow eclipse. It was a corpse light – a light that illuminated nothing. And remember when I talked about smoke-thick rooms, earlier? Well instead of smoke, we’re given the synthehol of smoke. A great thick fog enveloping all who enter this lair. What a cool venue.
Did I mention that the music is continuous? I didn’t. HARDWARE features four hours of continuous musical collaboration. You can listen to this set on S.P.A.Z. Radio here https://spaz.org/ to follow along. First up was Casual Decay, with some very earthy vocals and rolling liquid drums. It unfurled into ominous strings trailing behind shattered melodies, each bit crushed like ancient relics beneath a war drum’s rhythm. Casual Decay relayed to me in between tag outs that they’re working on a new release of some of their archived music, so I’m very much looking forward to that. Jon (Casual Decay) is always doing something collaborative, whether it’s a DJ set or an ambient live set, so you should definitely go out of your way to check out their live sets. Next up to join the collab was Production Unit Xero, one of the centralized figures in this collaborative venture. No stranger to the forge, PUX bears many sigils, among them SUMNER and they recently collabed with Errorgrid on a joint release with NNDL. PUX walks the coiled path of collaboration as though born to it. With them thrown in the mix, the music took a nice slow left turn – what began as a subtle change in trajectory became a descent into deeper currents – brooding and twinkling – like the workings of an old machine humming to life under strange constellations.
After that, Joel Noct joined the fray. The BPM shot up slightly and went into this oddly satisfying wire bending sound – there was a kind of architecture to it. It was giving shades of a downtempo Desert Palace from Sonic 3. Joel Noct always brings the heat and after listening to their ambient stuff, I can tell they’re having a blast, even if that manifests as calm precision. But really, I’ll be reviewing their albums sooner than later. Check out more of their work here.
Luckily at Process, the sound system is absolutely amazing so even tucked in the bar area, you could feel the low-end roll across the floor like a siege engine so you miss almost nothing besides the ambience of corpse light and frenetic energy of bodies basking in the glow of collaborative sound. That’s when I ran into Pr0xima, a local techno musician, who released a banger album in 2024 called “The Ugly.” Apparently, they’re about to release a new record called “Compulsory” in September on the label SubSensory Recordings. Looking forward to that album. I told them I was looking for some new Ambient Techno stuff to review and Pr0xima, without missing a beat, introduced me to Local Analyst, another resident techno wizard. Local Analyst just released their new album Walking Through Dust, which I’m going to have to check out. But we’re not through, because then they introduced me to a really cool chap who goes by QUANG.OI – a DJ and no doubt another dabbler of techno magic. They told me there’s another show at Process on Saturday, a Techno show, that features vinyl only. Unfortunately there are too many shows happening at the same time so I won’t make it. Embarrassment of riches. Anyway, tonight seems to be the night for new connections and it’s coming up aces.
I strolled back in to catch our friend Vyger joining the collab with Joel Noct and Hypersurface 303. Lots of deep bass and hard hits in my stomach. The sound system in this place is intense. Also, shoutout to local weirdos D. Phono, Occurian, Drozas, Cyclop Toad & Tati for being there to experience it with me.
What I love about this style of collaboration is that I really don’t know who’s doing what and what’s going where. It’s not that you lose track of who’s twisting what knob or launching which vocal detonation, you just don’t know WHERE it’s coming from. Pretty sure I’m hearing Fred Phelps from the Westboro Baptist Church in there? A righteous snarl that I haven’t heard since 2008. That HAS to be Vyger. Or maybe it was just a rogue televangelist pitched and mangled into submission – wait the sample, not Vyger. But do you see where I’m going with this? The night concluded with an amazing Hardware Ensemble of all the acts combining their powers and creating a megazord of sound.
This is what this music scene is all about – collaboration. Collaboration is something that a lot of people just can’t do. Our culture instills in us that we should only collect things, not be part of a collective. Collaboration requires surrender – of ego, of dominance, of the impulse to hoard. We’re taught from the cradle to grip and scrape, to stack trophies and call that living. But here, in the heat of a shared groove, something else takes hold. You look around and realize you’re not an island. Collaboration is the only way anyone is going to get out of this living death – it’s the understanding that you are not alone and the only thing universally true is that life as we know it is fleeting and it’s much better if you’re around people who are just as passionate sharing their lives with you, as you are with them.
Videos Courtesy of Ramon Mills (Production Unit Xero) & Bex
You can listen to this set on S.P.A.Z. Radio here: https://spaz.org/
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