Last year, Portland duo Soft Metals released a CD, Lenses, that’s sexy but without any heat. Listening to the music (which is artificial-synth, drum machine, sound effects) is much like touching the bodies of two people who are fucking, only to find their bodies are cold. Patricia Hall has the voice of a sentient computer on a spacecraft, and Ian Hicks produces beats that seem to be made by a process rather than a person. Barboza is the perfect venue for Soft Metals—underground, dark, cold, with anonymous bodies moving to the rhythms of a machine and the voice of a ghost. (Barboza, 925 E Pike St, thebarboza.com, 8 pm, $12 adv, 21+)

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...