I love my city, and others may disagree but we do OK, neither great nor boring as far as electronic dance music. Aside from the usual meat-market clubs playing identikit hypercheezee crapola, a couple places have good DJs, most consistently the Holocene (large club in Southeast) and Pi-Rem (a small club in a basement of a new high-rise in downtown Portland). There has been an on-again-off-again techno thing at Dunes (Mike Huckaby was there a while back). Platinum Records is still the biggest DJ-oriented shop in the city and there are some others. www.nwtekno.org is still the best public party and scene meetup list. I'm not real close to the action but one big thing is that we finally got our no-smoking-in-bars ordinance in place the first of this month so I'm actually going out more now.
fh PS I know this may come up -- you may have heard about the terrible tragedy outside the longstanding underage club The Zone last Saturday night. It had nothing to do with the scene here, just one messed up guy unloading on people waiting to go into the club and then killing himself. This is not the place to go into it, and the city is still digesting the news, but for more info: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2009/01/saturday_nights_shooting_teez.html
