- Torino, Motor City? At first glance, comparing the grandiose buildings, high-end fashion and gourmet food of the northern Italian city to the smog and decay of Detroit might seem at best tenuous, at worst cynical. But as we noted on our trip to last year's Club2Club festival, both cities share an inextricable link with the automobile industry and its changing fortunes, a fact proudly pointed out to us by many of the local drivers, promoters and DJs we met over our three-day visit. Certainly, something about Torino clearly appeals to the creators of Movement (those behind the Detroit Electronic Music Festival), who have spent the last few years tirelessly building the Movement Italy brand to make it one of the biggest single-night events on the Italy's dance music calendar.
Still, little could prepare us for the scale of Friday night's venue. Despite a relatively heavyweight line-up, we'd passed off our hosts' claims of "thousands and thousands of people" as typically Italian exaggerations, figuring that the three-room space would be akin to large scale clubs like Barcelona's Razmatazz, or London's matter. How wrong we were. As we arrive at the vast PalaOlimpico Isozaki, built for the city's 2006 Olympics, we realise that this is way more than just another techno party, with seemingly endless hordes of excitable young locals congregating in numbers more akin to a stadium rock show than a night of underground dance music. We're pretty early—it's only about 11pm—but already the main room is a seething mass of bodies, allowing us to catch only the most fleeting glance of a local warm up DJ and the frankly annoying MC accompanying him in the centre of the huge arena.
After no small amount of barging and bustling, we manage to make it upstairs to the so-called VIP balcony, which really allows us to survey the mass of bodies below us. Imagine Sonar's main room, times it by three, and you'll have some idea of the size of Movement 2008—surely all these people can't be "proper" techno fans?
Photo credit: Carl Wicker
The answer, unsurprisingly, seems largely to be "no." Despite a near-flawless sound system and a series of thumping cuts from François K, it's impossible to ignore the strangely restless atmosphere from above. Few of the 10,000 or so bodies appear to be facing the direction of the stage, or even dancing for that matter—like a human time lapse photograph, patterns of people swirl and move continuously, barely settling for a minute before streaming off elsewhere. Kevorkian is sometimes accused these days of ignoring his soul-heavy past in favour of lead-brained techno loopers, and while those looking for a Body and Soul-style disco fix would certainly have been disappointed tonight, his straight-ahead set is satisfyingly solid, all the same.
Worn down by the endless barrage of bodies, we head to the more intimate "deep and chunky" room, where NYC nu-house dude Dennis Ferrer is perilously walking the line between homage and fromage. Starting out with the ubiquitous parps of "Trompeta," Ferrer weaves in and out of thumping instrumentals and stiletto-sharp screamers, with hits like Byron Stingily's "Get Up" and Robin S's "Show Me Love" sending the girls into paroxysms of pleasure, while the boys try hard to look cool and sheepishly jig from side to side. We try equally as hard to loosen up and enjoy the ride, but the continual barging and early bar closure dampens our tired spirits. Ferrer is followed by Loco Dice who picks up the baton with a typically vogueish set of enjoyable but ultimately disposable post-minimal house grooves. Notably, he starts the set wearing a Cocoon T-shirt, but by halfway it's changed into a Los Hermanos logo—an apt metaphor for Dice's chameleon-like penchant for regular re-invention, if ever we saw one.
By this point, we're really starting to flake, in stark comparison to the infinite swathes of shiny Italian teenagers hyped on Red Bull. Derrick May has taken over from Francois K in the main room, and we do our best to get into his energetic selection of classics, but it's simply not happening. As May choppily introduces Aril Brikha's evergreen "Groove La Chord," we figure that it's gonna be more or less the same thing we've heard Derrick do many times before, and head at last for the exit. Away from the madness, we're able to reflect on the night's events more soberly. Sure, it was a mega-rave. Maybe, we're a bit too old to really enjoy events on that scale these days. And almost certainly, most of the event's attendees were there for reasons entirely unconnected with "the music." But there aren't many places in the world where Derrick May and François K can play in front of so many thousands of people, and for that if nothing else, Movement Italy can be deemed an undeniable success.
Photo credit: Carl Wicker
We take advantage of Saturday's winter sunshine to explore the city centre more fully, culminating in a delicious meal with Movement promoter Juni and his strikingly beautiful friends in a spectacular house high in the Monferrato hills. Suitably refreshed, we head to Lapsus for the Movement closing party, starring elusive Detroit house legend Kenny Dixon Jnr, AKA Moodymann. Despite being a long-time fan of KDJ, it's the first time we've heard him play out, and as befits a DJ who's well-known for his anti-press, anti-photo, anti-celebrity stance, there's a tangible sense of excitement in the air that was all too absent on Friday. Suffice to say, we're not disappointed. Spinning from behind a white curtain, KDJ's silhouetted shadow casts a powerful image against the venue's brick wall, his silky drawl accompanying a peerless selection of murky gospel house (his own "Shades of Jae"), Italo disco classics (Revanche's "1979, It's Party Time"), and sharp proto-techno hip hop (Egyptian Lover's "Freak-a-Holic"). The audience, who are considerably older, wiser and friendlier than the previous night's boshing teens, lap up every fretless-pluck and wailing vocal, climaxing as KDJ announces: "I'm enjoying myself. Damn, I wanna see what all y'all beautiful motherfuckers look like," cueing the removal of the curtain, and the eruption of the 200 or so beaming dancers. Gimmick? Maybe. Effective? Damn straight, as KDJ himself might say.
And so, unexpectedly, it's Moodymann who illustrates the real connection between Torino and Movement's home city of Detroit more succinctly than anyone else we've seen. For a short while as he stands behind the decks, his netted face gear and regular vocal interjections rendering him every bit the archetypal Detroit ghetto DJ, we forget that we're in a relatively prosperous Northern European city; it's like we're spinning around at Northland Roller Rink in 1985, or grooving in some decrepit downtown dive bar that has yet to learn of the minimal backlash, the digital-vinyl debate or any of the other trivial fripperies of modern techno music. It may be the case that Detroit's techno legacy stopped evolving into the future some time ago—but at the right place, and at the right time, the roots of the music we all know and love are still as powerful as they ever were. No matter if it goes backwards, forwards or from side to side—for the people of Torino, the movement continues on.