Show Review: Saka at 45 East

When Hong Kong-born Saka announced his current tour, dubbed Moonfall, he pitched it as “the next chapter” of his still-young career as a producer and DJ. It’s not an unusual branding in the fickle, fast-paced world of electronic music. All artists in that sphere need to remain on the bleeding edge or risk being quickly discarded as irrelevant.

For Saka, it’s a move that feels, in part, like a way to capitalize on recent leaps he’s taken in his career after netting some impressive bookings of late, spinning at both the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas and Miami’s Ultra Music Festival—two of the largest celebrations of dance music in the U.S. Calculated or not, it doesn’t make the music any less enticing.

As heard at 45 East this past Thursday, Saka has continued his rapid evolution beyond the multi-layered, nuanced 2023 release Silk or even the luscious drum ‘n’ bass of “Solace,” the single he dropped just last month. His lengthy set here in Portland went straight for the solar plexus with a dubstep mindset. The bass drops were enormous, undulating through the 100 or so fans who jammed the dance floor in big waves and the hard-hitting beats kept up a constant cycle of collapse and reconstruction.

Though Saka worked with the elements of tension and release, build and destroy that are part of the playbook for most bass-heavy DJs, he applied them sparingly, preferring to keep a consistent flow going for the sake of the folks who, by that point, had been in perpetual motion thanks to opening sets by local artists Cooper Stites and Merricat Black. That might not be the move when competing with dozens of other DJs at a big festival, but for a damp winter night in Portland, it was just what we needed.