- With an opening night scheduled for less than a week after the Movement Torino Festival has packed up its dancing shoes, you can't help but draw comparisons between Club to Club and the Detroit-centric event. While the arena-techno of Movement seems geared to establishing itself as a force to be reckoned with on the national and then European festival circuit, Club To Club looks intently at the ideas behind electronic music performance and consumption.
It's a festival with unexpected use of spaces, poles-apart audiences—from teenaged ravers to the mature attendees of the more experimental shows—and it plays a central role within Torino's wide-ranging arts initiatives and creative festivals in the region, but it also makes it difficult to pin down what exactly Club To Club is about. That said, it's certainly worth your while trying to figure it out.
Thursday
Heading to the first stop on our three day agenda, Torino's history at the centre of Italy's automobile industry becomes immediately apparent. Firstly, there are no concessions to those without cars. The locations are too far-flung. Secondly, when we pull up to the second opening night show, Do You Warp?, we arrive at a mega-complex of luxury car yards. The party is in here? Yes. Really? Yes. We enter.
The Mirafiori Motor Village bar looks like the high-end canteen of a retro-futuristic car dealership... because that's exactly what it is. Gleaming white and chrome, with huge white spherical lights, the bar's view through one glassed wall is of a sterile showroom with spit-shined Fiat's and Lancia's in various states of undress. The bar is heaving with several disorganised queues in a ridiculous three-stage drink paying/ordering/collecting process. Glamorous women totter by in sequins and over-the-knee high-heeled boots. The DJ plays Harmonic 313's "Dirtbox" as a large screen shows highly stylized images of what can only be described as car porn. It is completely surreal.
After searching in vain for a non-existent cloakroom we find the main room, a corporate-looking carpeted hall with a raised podium, surely the site for countless car launches and award presentations. As it's still early, we're surprised to see Warp boy wonder Hudson Mohawke already performing. His laptop DJ set is working its way through a selection of grinding wonky beats and bastardized R&B, as the crowd stands attentively in a crescent shape around the stage. Apart from a few head-nodders and a rebellious pocket of dancers, everyone simply stands and watches. HM perseveres, wrapping up with his excellent "Oops," somehow fitting the odd environment with its own quirky combination of impersonal mechanical beats and beguiling soul. Polite applause.
Warp prodigal son Jimmy Edgar is next, a curious addition to the lineup considering his public falling out with the label a couple of years ago. Melodramatic synths, smoke machines and a black-hooded Edgar give a gothic edge to the intro, which segues into a mix of electro breaks and tech-electro. Having well and truly warmed up the crowd, he soon finishes on a high, with an extra sleazy extended version of "My Beats," replete with an extended Prince-style keys workout. Next up are local DJs passEnger + xluve, who drive the kids wild with a set of MOR Latin-esque and tech house. The Warp section of the programme seems over, and uninspired by what remains, and the short length of HM and Edgar's sets, we pick our coats up off the floor and call it a night.
Friday
Waking with a fever, a queasy gut, a throbbing head and a misplaced will to live doesn't bode well for the rest of the day, which by far has the busiest programme of the entire festival. The evening's planned marathon is pared back to the essentials, with the focus being Jeff Mills' Italian premiere of his latest audio-visual odyssey, The Trip.
Billed as an "invitation-only" event for 50 people, we're dismayed to find a large crowd of clearly more than 50 milling around the entrance in the freezing cold, with only a select few being granted entry. We take refuge in the pizzeria across the way, waiting, and dash out when there is finally some movement in the queue.
The Mole Antonelliana is a grand building that houses the Museo Nazionale del Cinema (National Cinema Museum of Torino). The main vestibule is full of planetarium-style reclining seats and film set kitschery. A glass elevator on wires penetrates the middle of the room, reaching all the way up to the tower and down through the floor. Jeff Mills is already discreetly tucked away to the side of the room, behind his CDJs and a Roland synth. The lights dim.
Pieced together by Mills from old black & white sci-fi films, the 90-minute Trip sets an immediate tone of unease and tension with images of distorted and obscured faces, accompanied by Mills' live mix of ambient techno and space sounds. As Mills builds towards a crescendo of atmospheric X-102-sounding techno, close-up shots of actors' faces—looking straight into the camera in panic and fear, or off-screen contorted with horror and/or awe—are interspersed with disoriented astronauts and flashing lunar modules. The peak—holes being torn in the screen's canvas in place of an actress' eyes to reveal a pair of flashing, pulsating strobes—is a bit much for my feverish brain, but despite a couple of ever-so-slightly-off mixes and an occasionally crackling speaker, Mills justly deserves the standing ovation he receives at the film's end.
Onwards to Sala Espace for Digital Orbit Nocturne. Before even stepping into the darkened theatre, we are bowled over by the extremely loud PA, with a kick drum so forceful you can feel it in your bone marrow. On a raised stage, dramatically lit by a single lamp, and with a huge video screen to his left, Jon Hopkins is a wild man conductor, flailing arms and restless hands playing over his MPC and mixer, as the gentler, downtempo sounds of his repertoire are eschewed for his more recent hard-hitting and glitchy beats.
What may very well be the highlight of the entire festival starts innocently enough, as the simple pattern of bleeps of the beginning of "Light Through the Veins" is accompanied by a small, glittering form on screen. The track, undoubtedly one of his most accessible, grows and swells with emotion and melody as the glittering crystalline shape expands, twists, turns and morphs, filling the screen and the theatre with shifting patterns of light. The combination of music and visuals is so powerful and beautiful that I catch myself holding my breath at several points. Slamming straight into the grimy tones of "Update" breaks the spell, as does the accompanying crude psychedelic animation, and as the room's lights are inexplicably and abruptly switched on mid-track—a firm "get out!" if ever there was one—we leave for our final destination.
Supermarket, the only actual nightclub we'll see the entire festival, is heaving. Stadium-ready techno from Laurent Garnier fills every spare inch of space in the venue, as flashing strobes reflect off the shopping trolleys that hang from the ceiling. Flagging, and frankly intimidated by the number of energetic bodies, we take refuge a tiny pocket of space on the balcony.
From our non-vantage point, the crowd is enraptured, hands in the air, drinks in the air, and camera phones in the air for the Frenchman. Flanked by a keyboardist to one side and trumpet and sax on the other, a chatty Laurent is in his element, urging the crowd to give it up for himself, his band, the tunes, but in a completely charming way. The massive drums of "Pay TV" act as a bit of breathing space before an epic version of "Man with the Red Face." The weariness and sickness is momentarily forgotten as the room explodes—everyone knows this track like the back of their hand, but it feels like we're all hearing it for the first time. It's an uplifting end to the set, but by the time it's over—and considering Martyn has cancelled—Laurent & co leave the stage and we're suddenly once again aware of the pushing and elbow-jabbing behind us on the stairs, as Angel Molina begins his set. Time to go.
Saturday
Pushing through the pain barrier the night before has somehow pushed me through the sickness barrier, so feeling a lot less grim we head to Teatro Gobetti, a small-ish space with a charming mishmash of styles, for a sparsely attended lecture, and for a performance by American producer and percussionist Filastine. He swiftly works his way through drum machine, bongos and marching-band drum, alongside all manner of percussion that he regularly retrieves from a shopping trolley. Backed by images of burning oil fields, cuff-linked white hands exchanging money and protesters clashing with riot police, Filastine's agenda is clear, and a bit art student-y in its delivery, but the performance of upstart breaks and electronica is saved by the presence of an unknown female vocalist, who sings and raps magnificently in an unknown Arabic-sounding language.
Later that night in Lingotto Fiere, a gargantuan hall that could house a jet engine or two, the Club To Club grand finale is underway with DJ Pierre. As one of the originators of acid house, it's surprising to hear him playing banging tribal techno. But the notably young crowd is exuberantly lapping it up, cheering whenever he raises his hands in the air and beams (which is often).
Hopes for some acid action are reignited when we consult the lineup and see that Pierre will be making a second appearance in Sala Rossa, the much smaller 2nd room later in the night. After the local openers there, Nathan Fake treats the enthusiastic crowd to an excellent and driving set of his trademark melodic electronica and techno, relying heavily on tracks from Hard Island. Back to the main room again for our second serving of Jeff Mills in two days, who completely spoils us again. Taking it down a notch from the furiousness of Pierre's set, Mills' hands move with constant efficiency over the EQs, dropping a bass here, tweaking a mid there, perfectly pitching the progression of his set. It's a subtle, cerebral and instinctive groove, and everyone front and back of stage remains in awe, upright and engaged.
We dash into Sala Rossa to see what Pierre is up to, and sadly there is nary a hint of a 303, just some electro-ish house, Mannheim-esque beats and a thinning crowd. Back to the main room, then, for Carl Craig. He is as stoic as ever, and seems to struggle to find a groove for the first few tracks, but then settles into a reliably solid set peppered with his own famed remixes, finishing promptly at 6:10 with his remix of Cesaria Evora.
Elements of this night are fastidious in their organization. All the sets start and finish on time. The security contingent is large and constantly present. There is a health service stall at the entrance with pamphlets on every illicit drug imaginable, and bowls of free gum and condoms. Other decisions are baffling, though: The bars stop serving alcohol at 2 AM. A cordoned-off ambulance section near the door becomes a brightly-lit spectacle of youngsters puking into garbage bags, or passed out and wrapped up in hypothermia foil. And the inexplicable lack of a cloak room—an Italian thing?—which almost inevitably means that one of ours disappears from a pile on a sofa and distracts us from much of the last hour of Carl Craig's set.
Aside from these—and other—niggling organisational issues, though, Club to Club was a success. Sure, as you're zipping from one side of town to another in one of Torino's ubiquitous Fiats, from a club to a museum to an independent theatre to an arena of Italian teenagers chanting "Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!" it can sometimes be difficult to see that this is one cohesive event. But that's the charm of a festival that's open to all levels of interpretation and interaction.
Photo credits
Jimmy Edgar, Jon Hopkins, Filastine, Car - Oliver Cole
Jeff Mills - Andrea Macchia