Alfa Mito Club To Club 2014

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  • Jordan Rothlein took a particularly proactive approach to covering last year's Club To Club, hitting about eight parties in a few days. For my first time at the Turin festival, I decided on a more chilled method: one event per night, beginning Thursday evening and wrapping up early on Sunday morning. I felt that this was a good way to see the event through the eyes of locals who didn't have a five-day weekend at their disposal (the vast majority of attendees each year visit just a few events). But when the time came to leave Turin, I couldn’t help but wish I had spent a bit more time with the more avant-garde programme, as the dance floor-focussed parties I went to were, for the most part, disappointing. My weekend began a few hours before midnight on Thursday evening. Ben Frost headlined a night at a primary school-turned-live music space called Hiroshima Mon Amour. This was my favourite venue of the festival. With space for around 1,500 people, the interior is mostly black with two bars and a punchy sound system. Its simplicity is one of its strong points. The stage is fairly low and lighting is kept to a minimum, which puts the focus squarely on what's coming out of the speakers (at least when there were no clothing commercials being projected onto both sides of the room). Frost began with a burst of harsh noise. As he ran through tracks from this year's A U R O R A full-length, the feeling in the room during his one-hour slot was tense. He was joined on stage by a live drummer, which added more high-impact sounds via a barrage of hi-hats and snares. It's hard to single out any one moment as particularly hard-hitting, but hearing "Nolan" and "Diphenyl Oxalate" live was probably my Club To Club highlight. Kode9 was revealed to be the secret guest playing afterwards. The sound for the first 30 minutes of his set was terrible (distortion and feedback made the music barely listenable), but was eventually sorted out. Unsurprisingly, Kode9's selections were quality, but it seemed inappropriate to segue from Ben Frost's emotional experimental music to footwork in such a short time (to go from Frost's "Sola Fide" to DJ Spinn and Taso's "Burn That Kush" in less than an hour was a bit severe). Friday and Saturday's main events took place in the Lingotto Fiere convention centre. It featured a main stage in a huge warehouse-style space, and a club-like area (a room within the main room) called Sala Rossa. The sound in the cavernous main room also wasn't great, and many of the live acts I saw seemed to fall flat. After a solid start on Friday night, Caribou's Our Love-themed set went through long lulls in energy, which were exacerbated by the poor sound. SBTRKT the following night sounded similarly lifeless as he and his band played selections from his latest album, which wasn't helped by long pauses and rock star-esque quips ("You've been great, Turin!") in between tracks. Purely electronic artists had an advantage over groups using instruments. Clark was the best act I saw on Lingotto Fiere's main stage, delivering a laptop set of broken beat in hi-fi clarity. Recondite's techno later on in the night paled in comparison. In front of a tacky "#BERLINWALL25" projection, the German started with a smooth run of typically intricate melodies, but soon opted for festival-style white noise and big breakdowns. From where I was standing in the middle of the crowd, most people seemed happier chatting among themselves than listening to the music. It's hard to say whether this was due to lacklustre sound (the frequent speaker pops started to grate after a while) or Recondite's awkward placement after Apparat's live show, but the end result wasn't good. Marcel Dettmann began his closing set at 5 AM, but by that time hundreds of people were heading for the door. My time spent in Sala Rossa was more pleasant. Ben UFO and Ron Morelli's back-to-back to close out Friday night turned out a lot more serious than was expected, with the pair spinning mostly dark, loopy techno. This didn't do much to keep the dance floor busy, as people slowly trickled out as the mood grew darker and darker. Their track choices were occasionally baffling—after a heady 30-minute run, Ron Morelli finally had people jumping around with a swung, stripped back vocal track, only to kill the groove by bizarrely dropping a bland, hazy cut of outsider house. Also, seeing Ben UFO sitting down on a stool less than half-an-hour into the set wasn't exactly motivation to dance. Club To Club has a reputation as being a world-class event, but my recent experience there says otherwise. Granted, there's a significant experimental and academic programme that I could have seen more of, and I missed an event at the festival's most interesting venue, the 18th-century Teatro Carignano. That said, though this year's lineup was, as usual, hard to beat, it seemed like the organisers were happy just to host top-notch artists in interesting spaces, without stopping to consider the finer details. There are many more things that go into making a festival great and, sadly, Club To Club was missing a lot of them this year. Photo credits: Matteo Bosonetto, Andrea Macchia
RA