Skip to main content[EXPERIMENTAL] Two years ago, the space now occupied by the Someday Lounge was instead occupied by dust and garbage. Today, it's the most styled experimental venue I've ever been to. Responsible for filling the Old Town space's stage is 'Ringmaster' Noah Mickens—known on the Web as '5000. - N.' Mickens has been a stalwart of Portland's avant scene since it was confined to the Jasmine Tree, and in the three months since Someday's been open, his booking has been a marvel of extremity in variety, and extremity itself. We had to have a few words with him.
WW: Who and what are behind Someday Lounge?
Noah Mickens: A number of deep underground arts people in Portland entered the space and began to put on shows there circa late 2004. We had run shows there for about a year when we started to hear stirrings from the owners of the Backspace, Kris and Eric Robison, about leasing the room and opening it as a full-fledged nightclub spotlighting the kind of experimental music and performance the space was already known for. Since then, we've been running a slightly dodgy game of temporary occupancy permits and adjusted construction schedules to get the place up to its proper shape. Really, we're just now opening in earnest.
Is there an ideal behind the club?
New forms of beauty are desirable: Unexpected collaborations, mastery of traditional forms, sincere expressions, bold juxtapositions, dangerous ideas, secret plans, rapturous moments....
Initially, Someday Lounge has an 'establishment' vibe: very clean, and carefully designed. It seems antithetical to acts that would normally be found in warehouse spaces.
Surely this performance is deserving of a fine sound system, a large stage, a high ceiling, a beautiful house, a modestly funded advertising campaign and other perks that go, without saying, in the above-ground culture. Someday provides that. Within reason, I believe we can accommodate even the most ambitious productions: We've already had 50 gallons of water onstage...facilitated a collaboration between a Tuvan throat singer and the only Indonesian gamelan on the West Coast...thrown a packed, out-of-control gypsy dance party filled with marauding circus performers and spanking girls, more than I can properly go into. We've hosted performers from 10 nations and half the states in the Union. And we've only been open for three months.
Someday Lounge can be found at 125 NW 5th Ave., 248-1030. For the venue's upcoming events, see Headout, page 40.
WWeek 2015