On the official website of the C2C festival – so far known as Club to Club, the most important electronic music festival in Italy, on stage from 3 to 6 November with about thirty shows to mark the “return to normality” – on the location of the event reads this: “Turin / Europe”. It’s a detail, but it says a lot. On the one hand, in fact, there is talk of one of the festivals with the greatest international vocation in the panorama of our country, both for the choice of guests and for the attempt to involve audiences coming from abroad; on the other hand, it is precisely the link with the city in which it was born that makes it what it is. As if identities overlap: C2C is an expression of Turin, it could only have been born there, and it speaks to the world.
And this twentieth edition has tried to confirm this also by offering, more than in the past, an immersive experience in the city. It is true that it has renounced corollary events, but it has kept its symbolic places (the huge and functional Lingotto for the peak evenings of Friday and Saturday, which remained on hiatus during the pandemic; the smaller and more suggestive Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Ogr, for Thursday and Sunday) inviting spectators to arrive in the late afternoon to stay until four in the morning and guaranteeing the possibility of accessing the Agnelli art gallery and other areas of the Lingotto. Among other things, as usual, during the day there was also the Contemporary Art Week.
However, the artists did the bulk, renewing the ideological coordinates and the links with the original spirit, Savoy, of the event: from Jamie XX to Arca, from Autechre to Bicep, up to the Italians Nu Genea and Caterina Barbieri, it was a manifesto of “other” music – which the production calls “avant-pop”, avant-garde pop that looks to the future without distinction of genres – and of an intelligent way of making entertainment typical of the origins of the event.
Club to Club, in fact, was born in 2002 as an underground event, one night, where with a single ticket you could go around the Murazzi clubs. From club to club, in fact, at a time when the culture of clubbing it shone and Turin was the center of that different, contaminated, free nightlife.
Then that model disappeared there as in all of Italy, but paradoxically the festival has grown, becoming the largest among those indoors in our country and a reference in Europe. Among the past guests: Franco Battiato (2014), Thom Yorke (2015), Aphex Twin (2018). He institutionalized himself, he discovered the spaces of the Lingotto and an attentive and affectionate public, and yet he never lost his taste for the most alternative proposals and research, for a dance and intelligent music. All the more this year in which he definitively “left the club”, from the name – passed from Club to Club, to the less binding C2C – to the program.
Arca at the Club to club, Turin, November 2022.
(Kimberley Ross)
It was therefore an edition in the name of contamination, of contemporaneity and in a broad sense of experimentation, between hyper-pop, jazz, rap and r & b and electronics as a red thread. The best performances were precisely those consistent with this approach, such as the DJ set that Jamie XX transformed into a long party in which between fragments taken here and there he managed to make everything seem “pop”, popular: dubstep and its songs how GoshSteve Aoki’s battle pieces, the Beach Boys and Italian gems like the 2nd choir of washerwomen.
A similar speech for Bicep, who the next day, in a concert of synthesizers and psychedelic visuals, played for two hours almost a single stream of their songs, passing from dance to house to techno. And the same goes for Nu Genea, who simultaneously performed in the other room in a DJ set with live inserts that, as always, fished in unusual seas such as the Middle Eastern ethnic and the Italian, Neapolitan, seventies and eighty. On Saturday, moreover, the artistic direction of that stage was taken care of by them, with shows chosen from all over the Mediterranean; among these, that of Deena Abdelwahed was the best, a confirmation of the tradition that the festival serves to discover little-known artists.
More complex, but always bewitching, the performances of Autechre and Caterina Barbieri, with the English group – perhaps not enhanced by the dinner time and by a stage different from the one on which they were supposed to perform – who played their intricate and cerebral electronics. completely in the dark, almost as if it were an installation, keeping faith with the usual extreme and experimental approach.
Barbieri instead brought to the main room, in a highlight of the third day, his meditative world, slow, made of loop hypnotic, always capable of enchanting the public.
On the other hand, the few perplexities came from the less daring performances: Lyra Pramuk’s hyper pop seemed really too monotonous; Yendry, despite expectations (his Of had been chosen by Barack Obama among the best songs of 2021!), it seemed fragile and approximate; and the dj set of My Analog Journal, which passed in minutes for Conga, What is love di Haddaway e Freed from desirehas failed to fulfill any research promise.
The Nu Genea exhibition, Turin, November 2022.
(Kimberley Ross)
On the contrary, it is worth remembering the crazy funk of Caribou, the dark and intense sounds of the Scottish DJ Kode9 and the physical rap of Pa Salieu, with a free jazz style rhythm section. As proof, all of them, of an extensive program that has maintained the announced times. And it was nice to move from one pavilion to another of the Lingotto so that we could hear at least a little of everything.
Perhaps it is livability, what makes great festivals usable by all, which at times is a bit lacking: the spaces to attend concerts away from the crowd have always been there, but the token system to replace the euro – now in use in every event of this kind, it must be said – it was developed in a cumbersome way, and on Saturday for safety reasons, if you wanted to move from the main pavilion to the secondary one, you were forced to go out and walk a few tens of meters in the cold.
Fortunately, then, as soon as the heat and the party atmosphere were back they always won. The same heat and the same atmosphere that had welcomed the spectators on Thursday at the Ogr during the Arca live, which came at the end of a cold and rainy day that most of those present had spent traveling to Turin. The Venezuelan artist started with the strangest and most futuristic pop songs, at the end she began to hit hard with the most reggaeton part of the repertoire, but above all she made jokes, she cut herself (ouch) by accident and in general she destroyed the diva aura surrounding her. In short, you showed the human side of the experimental and futurist music that we would have listened to from then on. And indeed it was strange that such a famous artist performed on Thursdays, especially in small Ogrs. But her presence probably had something programmatic, it was a way to get the measures taken and make the audience feel immediately at home. At C2C, in Europe, in Turin.