Scene Report: Modbang PDX — 1 Year Anniversary Party

Show: Modbang PDX — 1 Year Anniversary Party

Venue: The Midnight PDX + The Sïx

The folks who run Modbang shows say it’s, “No laptops. No DJs. Just machines, wires, and pure voltage.” Computers are off the menu. Digital Audio Workstations? Excommunicated. Before the show, we decided that if you can check your email on the machine, it’s out. That’s a good primer for me.

The setting? The Six below the Midnight – a quaint, dungeon-esque venue. Some revel in the seclusion of the cement box below the bar, but I imagine others are drawn to its cozy cave-like qualities, where all it requires is about fifty people to hit capacity and turn the place into a breathing organism. Whether they treat it like a sensory isolation tank or a cocoon for their weirder selves, it’s a nice escape for now until we all join the resistance.

First up was Kid Camaro. Can I just say that I absolutely adore Kid Camaro? Besides the fact that I’m really into his music, he always wears this badass cloak while playing that reminds me of the sorcerer Thoth-Amon from the film the “Conan the Destroyer”. I always felt kind of bad for that iteration of Thoth-Amon – sitting alone in his crystal castle filled with ice, mirrors, daggers and golden skulls just hoping that some day a beautiful princess would come and touch the Heart of Ahriman for the first time in a thousand years. Anyway, Kid Camaro’s entire vibe was the perfect start to the evening. Pretty sure I distinctly heard the track “Trying”, an absolute drum and bass gem filled with chorused and flanged vocals – I love that track and it sounds amazing in this space. He always brings his best – a fitting way to open the night with just enough momentum to rattle the bones without blowing out the senses. Check out some of his set below.

I descended into my ritual of talking to Occurian about our shared medical anxiety. A mutual spiral of medical dread – you know, just two paranoid fucks conducting a grim autopsy on ourselves in real time as we speak about our organs and what kinds of debilitating issues we may be having that will surely lead to cardiac arrest in the near future and/or sudden death. But like most people in this scene, we’re neurodivergent and cat-adjacent so our attention was captured by Accuraci who did visuals tonight, and we were curious what kind of visual odyssey we were set to go on and honestly, it was pretty mad. Lots of very clear and angular shapes – I believe they call it “geometry” or maybe Euclid on a ketamine bender. If the music cracked open the skull, Accuraci stuffed it with diagrams and let the static run wild – the perfect accompaniment to the music tonight.

Next up was Blaix. The mad organizer behind this whole voltage-drenched affair who has seen his fair share of physical setbacks this past year – and I don’t mean borderline paranoid medical delusion like I was talking about earlier, no, I mean actual physical setbacks. Motorcycle accidents, kidney stones – the kind of physical trials that would leave most people trembling in a bathrobe while watching the Golden Girls to calm the nerves. But Blaix is still here, and bringing the 200 BPM heat. Full-throttle, blood-rushing, borderline cardio hazard. I asked him about when his next album would be coming out and he told me he’s been “procrastinating” – then it occurred to me that he’s recovering from a fucking MOTORCYCLE WRECK, but who’s keeping track, right? The set was a scorcher – check out some of it below.

I had to step outside after that last set. Blaix rattled my ribcage like a jackhammer on a tin roof. I was getting the bass full force in my chest and I’m not ashamed to admit that it was a little too intense for me. SLTHR was at the show and when I told him I had to step outside, he leaned in and calmly explained that my dumb ass had been parked in the worst possible spot – right at the back of the bar where the bass came at me twice: once from the front of house and again from the unholy bounce off the wall behind me. The one life where I choose not to be a sound engineer.

I went upstairs for a minute to give my skeleton a break from the punishment downstairs and that’s when I ran into our good friend Dhug. I was really curious about his trip to the Big Apple and he launched into his NYC saga like a man possessed. The crown jewel of his tale was finding himself at some Irish bar in gods know where at 10 a.m. on a Sunday, drinking a beer surrounded by a pack of lacrosse mutants pounding lagers while celebrating their glorious victory over some, no doubt, concussed and bloodied lacrosse players.

No time for losers though, it was back downstairs where I caught beginnings of Lil Kevo 303‘s set. Kevo summoned a particular breed of chaos, tonight – part rave gremlin, part 16-bit demon, but mostly all smiles and flailing limbs. The room, once breathable, became a packed-out sweat lodge of bitcrushed joy and malfunctioning dance instincts. At one point Kevo climbed onto a table delivering some kind of breakbeat scripture. As my eyes were scanning the edges of the crowd, I saw a few faces that didn’t move right. Then I imagined this would be a great opportunity for US intelligence agencies to send in a few facilitators – investigate the future resistance. It was at the moment it occurred to me that I was just looking at random mid 40-something dudes, and that any one of these Gen Z kids could, in fact, be an intelligence agent. It sent a shiver down my spine. All that delusional thinking being said, I would definitely check out more of Lil Kevo 303‘s music. Some of his set is below.

The final set of the night was Production Unit Xero. The bass that comes out of those speakers is like bathwater furiously filling up your bathtub as you watch the waterline crawl toward your eyes. You brace for the inevitable drowning, but it never comes. Instead, you’re swallowed in a slow, euphoric asphyxiation of sound. It envelops you. Evidence of this was just witnessing both spectrums of the room. On one end, people were caught in a frenzy but locked in with the music – the other side was a nice murky place with a couple fused together in the muck of it, minds miles away, dissolving into each other like wax figures forgotten near a heater. No phones, no future, no rent due tomorrow. Just the hum. And in this fading republic, that’s the best pipe dream most of us can hope for. Absolutely wonderful set from Production Unit Xero as always.

As I stood outside waiting for my ride, I couldn’t shake the thought that we’re dancing at the edge of something hideous. The boot seems to be three-quarters of the way on our necks. What we have is an open-air autopsy of a dying republic, and while the lights strobe and the bass hits, we’re left pondering a resistance, if not through conventional weapons, maybe with something our enemies truly seek to hold, but will be forever be unable to: culture and community.