Club To Club 2013

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  • With events both academic and ravey running at multiple venues each night throughout Turin, Club To Club doesn't play out like your average music festival. For someone who's never been to the Piedmontese metropolis before, this setup is both a strength and a weakness: it gives you a chance to see more of the city than one normally would during a festival, but it also makes it one heck of a marathon. Music started around 6 PM each night and would wrap up—often on the other side of town—sometime in the wee hours. The best way to take in Club To Club (or Alfa MiTo #C2C13, as it was branded this year) is to get your hands on the program early and cop tickets to the events that suit your tastes. I went full-bore, which meant I got to know a fair number of Turinian taxis and went home with profoundly sore feet at the end of the weekend. My ears, however, buzzed pleasurably. The music programming was excellent across the board. Though the festival had plenty of 4/4 kicks and party-starting DJ sets—especially during Friday night's afterparty and the massive Saturday night finale—some of the best music was abstract, bass-heavy and tremendously loud. A pair of Tri Angle artists, The Haxan Cloak and Forest Swords, turned in two of the most impressive live sets. The former put the hefty soundsystem installed at the Cantieri OGR Torino, a former train repair facility, to work, pushing out terrifically physical low-end. You couldn't exactly move to Bobby Krlic's set, though I felt my jeans flapping in the bassy breeze as cuts from his excellent second album, Excavation, filled the cavernous room. (The previous night, Factory Floor did damage of a different sort: their blend of techno and no wave somehow started a fire.) Performing as a duo, Forest Swords played up the dub of Engravings and brought some much-needed vibes to what was effectively a lecture hall at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Diamond Version, AKA Raster-Noton founders Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender, absolutely slaughtered the main stage on Saturday with torrents of razor-sharp computer music. The better venues were stars in their own right. Club To Club's opening-night concert had James Holden playing live at the dazzling Teatro Carignano, a velvet-and-gold-leaf hall so gorgeous it almost felt unreal. Holden's set, more of a concert than your usual techno live PA, got tighter and more immersive as it went, with synth tones that felt at home amidst the opulence. Both the Cantieri OGR and Lingotto Fiere, where the finale was held, were epic post-industrial spaces, but their size gave sound—especially the gut-rattling low-end—plenty of room without becoming oppressive. The latter venue had a second space, an oval-shaped room cast entirely in red, which hosted some of the most party-friendly music of the festival. It was there that Kode9 and Rustie played, shoving more continuum-spanning bass in our faces than most probably thought possible. Sherwood & Pinch really delivered the set of the night in there, though, with Sherwood's collection of reggae vocals emphasizing a side of bass that's too rarely heard these days. My complaints about Club To Club are nearly all structural. The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo didn't quite work as a venue. The acts who played there—Holly Herndon, Lee Gamble and Forest Swords, plus a handful of lesser-known opening acts—played very well, but they had to deal with a lot of crowd motion in a hall that required a captive audience. With seats tightly packed and a relatively loud bar just outside the door, any movement in or out really disrupted some of the festival's most detail-oriented music. In between sets, the doormen would come through and ask everyone to leave, and then it was never exactly clear when the next program would start. If you went to the bar to grab a quick intermission drink—which you couldn't bring into the theater with you—you'd likely get shut out of the next set. Club To Club could also do more to be manageable as a unified festival. It generally wasn't possible to walk between venues, and taxis were an all-too-hot commodity at the end of each show. Given the quality of the programming and the attention to detail the festival's more experimental acts demand, you'd really want to have the option of seeing everything without exhausting yourself in the process. I heard rumors of shuttle busses, but I never caught a glimpse of one. That said, Club To Club's concept might inherently run counter to any easy streamlining, and with impressive performances and sellout crowds each night, it seems to be working well for them.
RA