- Music festivals can be said to broadly fall into two categories. There's the type that us kids are familiar with, but there's also the more mature likes of the Proms with orchestras in concert halls. Club to Club is pretty unique in the way it falls in between these two, with cutting edge electronic artists in a range of interesting venues across Turin in a well-curated manner that, although first and foremost still a party, highlighted the finer aspects of the music.
The locations—an opulent theatre, a gleaming car showroom, a natural science museum complete with dinosaur skeleton—were several cuts above the muddy fields and holiday centres Brits might be used to. And there was the programming: Plaid and the Southbank Gamelan Players hypnotised with bell-like rhythms-within-rhythms that showed the gamelan's influence on artists like Aphex Twin and Four Tet, and sets by Four Tet and Caribou in turn complemented James Holden's melodic style the following night.
Photo credit: Liz Eve
Rhythmic exploration similarly had a hearty representation from the likes of King Midas Sound, Joy Orbison, Shackleton and Modeselektor, and was appreciated in both the theatre with Kode 9 first performing Burial—seemingly taking stems from his tracks and dovetailing them into a drifting wash—then bringing on Spaceape for some voodoo incantations, and in the science museum with Rob Hall representing even more abstract experimentation.
You could even say techno brought its opera glasses: Marcel Dettmann and Shed, as usual, sculptured detail into its gritty crags, but in particular Jeff Mills was back at the festival doing something special again, this time with his incredible Something In The Sky European debut, combining videos of mission control and UFO sightings with a set that accordingly took us into outer space with gradual evolutions and weird analogue patterns held for what seemed like hours; it was the closest I've seen techno come to fine art. Turin locals like Vaghe Stelle, The Opium Child and Paolo Dellapiana were present too, with surprisingly accomplished sets for local artists, with all of this giving a feel of rich and healthy growth of the music scene in the city that led James Holden to tweet first about "something... happening in Italy" and then simply "THE ITALIAN NEW WAVE" over the course of the weekend.
Photo credit: Liz Eve
As we were following a van around the city on the last evening, out of the back of which locals were playing resonant drone, acid, nationalistic orchestral music and much in between, the theme of "The X Superstition" was explained to us by an extremely charismatic Italian lady: basically, Turin sits on the middle of an "X" made by two international triangles of white and black magic. Screens around the venues showed dice, crossed fingers and the like, but with such an interesting theme, it would have been nice if the organisers had done more with it, perhaps with decorations or something even more outside the box, so that we felt like we were partying in the theme. Aside from this, it all went pretty much without a hitch—the climactic event went off like a depth charge, and the sound was great (leading a number of artists on the circuit to rate it highly).
But above all, it was great to see an event break the mould with this kind of creativity. Dance music is maturing, and with so many festivals around that'll just combine interchangeable lineups with interchangeable settings, surely it's time for other festivals to mature too.