Scene Report: Second Saturday (Somewhere in NE Portland)
SHOW: Second Saturday – Somewhere Deep in the Heart of NE Portland
I’m filing this dispatch from deep inside Second Saturday, a monthly underground gathering of electronic misfits, freaks, and sonic chemists hidden in some unassuming corner of Northeast Portland – a place so unmarked and unofficial it might as well exist in a parallel dimension. No flyers. No velvet rope. Just follow the low-frequency rumbles and the faint glow of synth light bleeding through a basement window that resembles the glow of a Talanian workstation.
Second Saturday happens, as you might’ve guessed, on the second Saturday of every month – a ritual gathering where people who speak in waveforms come to test machines, minds, and maybe a god or two. The drinks flow like some unregulated river, the LEDs shimmer and yeah sometimes there’s public-use baklava.
It’s those obscenely beautiful Spring evenings that suddenly remind you: Portland is gorgeous. In that weird, haunted, slightly dry kind of way. The trees are vibrating. People start smiling again for no goddamn reason. That’s when you find yourself walking toward some unmarked house, slipping past bikes and porch plants, into what looks like nothing special – until the door opens and the stairs call you. I wouldn’t classify it as a basement, but it’s where the basement should be. It’s where the true machinery of the city lives. No stage, no green room, no posturing – just wires, knobs, synths, samplers, and no pretense. Just a crew of beautiful maniacs chasing sound like it owes them psionic energy.
The collaborators at Second Saturday shift every month, but the usual suspects always manage to crawl back through the fog. This round gave us Casual Decay, Kid Camaro, Bex, Occurian and Maximum Strength, who rolled in with a CB radio rig and a pedal that looked like it had been hijacked from a ‘70s long-haul trucker and rewired for psychic warfare. All the Stores are Closed made an appearance, a long with Rob (might recognize them from Electro Skronk Classics), Drozas, and Production Unit Xero was leading the charge as always, locked into the cockpit like they were steering a ship through low orbit – always bringing the heat and the connection. And then there was Todd – a local street prophet, cultural wildcard, and possible mycelium-based oracle simultaneously operating on separate frequency. You don’t meet Todd so much as you realize you’ve been in his orbit for a while without knowing it. Todd has what can only be described as a mutant-level gift for securing niche clothing – like he’s tapped into some underground pipeline of cosmic thrift. He’ll show up in pieces you’ve never seen before and probably never will again. Case in point: Malcolm X socks – actual, real, possibly prophetic. That’s the kind of energy Second Saturday brings.
The art? All over the place – raw, hypnotic, sometimes duct-taped. But the artists? Dialed the hell in. There’s a lot happening inside Second Saturday. Sound. Movement. Rants about Predator 2 being canonically linked to They Live! But under all the noise and neon, it’s a night rooted in collaboration – real musical precision disguised as chaos. Second Saturday guides spirits to the signal séance. Where is it happening? In your hearts and in our minds. To find Second Saturday is to be tuned in – and if you’re tuned in, really tuned in, you’ll feel it guiding you. A quiet draw toward the strange signal humming behind the noise, where bodies blur into sound and thought dissolves into rhythm.
