It’s kind of in the nature of something of their size, but festivals do book a lot of shite.
Club to Club, refreshingly, don’t. For the Turin weekend which made up the core of their festivities, there’s less than 30 artists. There’s a few local DJs and lesser-known names in there, but compared to Sonar, let alone Bestival, it’s refreshingly succinct in its programming. Funny then, that the festival opened with the least succinct performance of the weekend.
First up on Thursday night was Warp Records stalwarts Plaid, performing with the Southbank Gamelan Players. For a while, this was great – from what I could tell, the first few songs consisted of the Gamelan Players solo, Plaid hidden behind their Macbooks, presumably sampling what was going on. The duo then took centre-stage, subtly beefing up those samples into what basically consisted of banging house, before the Gameplan Players joined in for what should’ve been the climax of the collaboration, the veiled face projected on the screen behind them shape-shifting to the music. Imagine Pantha du Prince’s juxtaposition between petal-thin melodies and fat basslines projected on a major scale, and you’re about right.
This was the first of two showcases at the magnificent Teatro Carignano, meaning everyone was sat down in relative darkness – perfect for something like this, where you engage not just with the music made but how it’s being made. It did however, mean that when the performance went on for close to another hour past that aforementioned climax, a lot of people either left, or were visibly asleep by the end. Uh-oh.
Darkstar
The second performance at the Teatro Carignano came on Friday, with a Hyperdub showcase consisting of Kode9, Darkstar and Spaceape. The theatre really has to be seen to be believed, and proved an idyllic setting for the most intriguing performance of the festival, Kode9 playing Burial. We found out prior to events that the soundman wouldn’t let the bass get too high, as during the soundcheck dust had started to fall from the ceiling. As a result, everything sounded a little thinner than it could have – but I guess that’s part of the problem when it comes to playing a venue constructed in the first half of the 17th century. In fact, the venue was the main reason Kode9 had agreed to do it.
The Burial set probably lasted half an hour, and on more than one occasion used the beatless ‘Endorphin’, from second Burial album Untrue, to fuse the other cuts. The majority was new, or at least unreleased; one track had a fat El-B style bassline, and another sampled Wu Tang. What the performance really made clear though was how still Burial’s music is. God knows the guy’s had countless offers to play at festivals, but if he did a set of his own material it wouldn’t suit a pissed up field – when you hear it played in a theatre like this, it really emphasises how much more its place is in ambient music than dance music. Which makes it all the more remarkable how well-received and popular it’s been.
Kode9 was then joined by Spaceape for a live set. Like the Burial set, most of this was unreleased. Tracks never really began or finished, with Kode mulching everything into one long piece, though the biggest reactions from the crowd came for the recognisable moments, like the lead synth from ‘Black Sun’, the riff from ’9 Samurai’ (and later the Quarta330 remix) and ‘Time Patrol’. Spaceape always seems to divide people, but he was really good here, echoing his own voice to add to the disorientating qualities of the music, which was usually based around slightly stuttered drums and big, polluted synths bubbling and dripping with paint. Kind of ‘Black Sun’-core, or something.
Darkstar suffered most from the thin sound, as they had music coming out of about four different sources (mic, synths, Macbook, etc) as opposed to Kode and Spaceape’s two. One of North‘s qualities is the way the vocals are treated, which obviously you lose live. That’s fine, as Buttery’s a good vocalist in the traditional sense, but when the synths were coming through as low as they did here, the vocals dominate too much, which isn’t what Darkstar’s songs are about. The band were visibly pretty pissed off, but I dare say it sounded worse on stage with monitors in your face than it did at the back of the venue, where it apparently sounded fine.
Shackleton
The first DJ performances of the weekend came on Thursday night, at a huge car showroom – the polar opposite of the theatre in terms of everything but size. I hadn’t seen Floating Points DJ for over a year, but he might have played the best set I saw all weekend, starting with funk and hip-hop (you still can’t go wrong with Madvillain), rolling through a ton of Chicago-sounding house tracks no one knew but everybody loved, and finally peaking on a well-timed techno shredder which had the locals going predictably mad. Plus, obviously, he brings his own custom-made rotary mixer with him, and in terms of actual sound, his tunes, nearly all played off vinyl, were the fattest of the festival.
The rest of the weekend’s sets were probably what you’d expect. Joy Orbison followed Floating Points after a healthy five minutes of silence for the mixer changeover, and quickly got the crowd back into things with the sort of discerning blend of house and garage, old and new that you expect from him. He probably went a bit harder and faster than a normal Joy Orb set, but it suited the mood of the room. Opening his set on ‘Gypsy Woman’ was a smart move.
Friday night’s post-Hyperdub performances took place at the uncomfortably heaving Hiroshima Mon Amour venue on the edge of town, and saw King Midas Sound overcome a couple of false starts to win the crowd over, Kevin Martin finishing the set on a squealing solo noise epilogue. Caribou meanwhile was a bit like trance for indie kids, but everyone loved it so maybe I’m just a cock. Four Tet followed, sounding healthily techy. Meanwhile, in another venue on the other side of town, Jeff Mills did his Something in the Sky thing for four hours. Obviously I missed this, but I imagine it was great if you were battered and just four hours of techno if you weren’t.
Shed
The main event of Club to Club took place on Saturday night, in, as you’d expect, an enormous hanger full of rave casualties and fridges full of energy drinks. Shackleton, in the smaller second room gave the sort of time-stopping performance you expect from him when he’s got a chance to have his way with you in a (relatively) intimate dark room. He’s someone in total control of his sets right now, leaving nothing to chance with massively warped breakdowns that got more and more disorientating and psychedelic as the hour progressed. Not to sound like a hippie, but you find yourself shutting the rest of the world off and zoning out to his sets without even consciously shutting your eyes – and there’s not many people who’re able to force that effect on you. Jamie xx followed, and wasn’t amazing, but it was refreshing to see someone actually try to beat-match on a Saturday full of live (or, you know, “live”) performances. He’s also got that really nice quality of being able to draw from a decent-sized pool of artists, and change the rhythm of his set quite a lot, but have it all sound like a Jamie xx set. He’s clearly got an aesthetic he likes, and he makes the tunes work to that.
Shed is an incredibly skilled producer, but I don’t know if he suited the second room here. His productions are quite straight at lot of the time, and his more club-orientated tracks rely so much on their engineering for their power that the less sound he gets to play with, the more his live set will suffer. That’s not to say that the second room here had poor sound, but he wasn’t able to hit you with overwhelming waves of bass the way he could’ve in the main room, or has done at Sonar in the past. Also bless him, he is the Mark Corrigan of techno, and when he doesn’t look like he’s that into his set it can translate into the crowd, resulting in an awkward relationship between the two.
If Shed’s the Mark Corrigan of techno then Marcel Dettmann is the Alan Johnson, and although he hardly pushed the boat out with a set of, er, driving Berghain-friendly techno with the odd skippy bits to break it up, it’s amazing how much authority he’s got behind the decks. Even when he arrived at the hotel, he’s got a real aura to him with his long coat and perfect stubble length, and electronic music could do with more people who have that kind of un-approachability to them. James Holden, who played before him, looked a bit of a wet blanket in comparison.
Tom Lea
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