Does Italy’s Coolest Music Festival Make Sense in New York City?

Across nearly a quarter-century, Italy’s C2C festival has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s coolest, most adventurous music events. Its bookings are impeccable, drawing mostly electronic acts who work at the genre’s bleeding edge: Aphex Twin, Autechre, Arca, Sophie, Nicolas Jaar, and A.G. Cook, to name a few. Hosted in the northern Italian city of Turin, the four-day fest invites vacationers to escape the everyday amid quaint cobblestone streets, scenic views of the Alps, and a giant main venue located in a converted Fiat factory. So when I heard C2C was coming to New York City for the first time, I was intrigued. Could Italy’s longest-running music fest make a dent in one of the planet’s busiest nightlife destinations?

There are some big differences between the C2C in Turin and its New York offshoot. Instead of lasting four nights, the NYC fest took place in just one, last Friday. Instead of hosting more than 40,000 attendees across venues throughout Turin (C2C stands for Club to Club), it was housed in a single spot: the warehouse-y Knockdown Center, capacity 3,200, located in an industrial part of Queens with views of tire shops and a Chase bank. By all accounts, this was a relatively modest American excursion. But still, the lineup lived up to the fest’s pedigree, filled with experimental electronic vets like Oneohtrix Point Never and Jlin alongside promising newcomers including the ambient jazz composer Nala Sinephro, blippy pranksters Two Shell, and London rapper John Glacier. On paper, at least, the collected talent stood out amid the big city’s endless temptations.

Things started off tranquilly, with hi-fi guru Devon Turnbull offering a DJ set that leaned heavily on languid jazz courtesy of legends including Sonny Rollins and Alice Coltrane. It let early attendees take in the fest’s tricked-out lighting—highlighted by yellowish beams that came down from the ceiling and gave alien abduction vibes—and led perfectly into what turned out to be the night’s flat-out greatest act.

Nala Sinephro has released two of this decade’s most mind-expanding albums, 2021’s Space 1.8 and last year’s Endlessness. A mainstay of London’s avant-jazz scene, she is a harpist, composer, and synth whiz who makes every sound count. Her music is a bulwark against runaway technology and productivity metrics—it soothes and luxuriates, stretching out time so that you can practically see the strands of relativity hanging in the air around you. 

Alongside a drummer, saxophonist, and synth player, Sinephro looked downright regal as she took the stage behind her harp. Bathed in a golden glow, she led the band through a lovely, mood-setting opener before quickly moving to an analog synthesizer. It was there that she spent most of her time, gently conducting her band with head nods and small gestures as she continuously warped and bent just a few choice notes. The whole group was incredibly intuitive, reacting to each other in real time, finding pathways in between and around Sinephro’s oscillating frequencies. At one point, the band suddenly slowed together, as if they were spontaneously screwing the music down as they played. Subtle dub rhythms came and went. This was minimalism you could use, a musical universe where space was something to be cherished rather than filled in. Sinephro was mostly stoic on stage, with long, beaded braids hanging down her back and wired frames perched on her nose, but at the end of the set she allowed herself a huge smile. It was earned.

From there, I headed to the fest’s second stage, a small room behind the main area that holds just over 200 people. It was packed, uncomfortably so, for John Glacier, a deadpan rapper who recently released her debut album, Like a Ribbon, for the vaunted indie label Young. Over beats that are equal parts woozy and gritty, she lists off boasts like “Know you like it, Glacier look so deadly/This is my space, why they wanna friend me?” in a terminally unimpressed tone, as if she’s almost bored by her own would-be dominance. On record, this tactic draws you in. On stage, though, it just looked like she was super duper bored. 

After snaking through the room to get a decent view, I was disappointed to see Glacier just standing there, one hand in her pocket, giving absolutely nothing. She was rapping with all the enthusiasm of a corporate CEO reading a Q3 report on a teleprompter. I understand her whole thing involves a distant nonchalance, but there needs to be some intensity behind that style to keep it from just coming off as sleepy or uncaring. Making matters worse was her ostensible DJ, who looked even more bored, with both hands in his windbreaker’s pockets, as he awkwardly stood near the front of the stage in the yawning minutes between when he cued up beats. Yes, the DJ equipment should have been placed behind Glacier instead of in front of her. But it’s never good when the people on stage look like they’d rather be anywhere else.

I took in some of Miami producer Nick León’s chill spin on dembow on the main stage, which was pleasant enough, though it felt a little timid for a festival claiming to showcase edgier sounds. (The stock footage of flowers and sunsets flashing on the big screen behind him didn’t help.) So I tried to move back to the second stage, where the great footwork producer Jlin was on, but the room was so overfilled that people were lined up by the only entrance, hoping to catch a fleeting peek of the Indiana producer. I didn’t feel like muscling my way in only to be scrunched for an hour, so I missed her set. If C2C returns to Knockdown at some point, perhaps they could set up the second stage outside, in the venue’s Ruins area, so that people could enjoy more of the night’s music and maybe even have some space to dance to it.

That said, this version of C2C wasn’t really about dancing; a lot of the music lived in a dance-adjacent realm where there were bass and beats, but they didn’t exactly come at regular intervals. As someone who is generally embarrassed by the way my body moves, this was fine with me (my favorite moment of the night was Sinephro’s dreamy jazz, after all). But it made for an interesting confluence of concertgoers. Most were millennials, probably finishing up another long work week, perhaps realizing that staying up until 2 a.m. isn’t so simple in your mid-30s. (I caught some folks covering yawns in the wee hours.) There were some Gen Z club kids, some of whom looked like they really wanted to dance and were consistently underwhelmed by the oblong tempos and strange sounds coming from the stages. This tension—to dance or not to dance—seems key to the C2C experience, making it headier than any old club night anywhere else in New York. But this truncated American version often couldn’t help but feel less ambitious. It didn’t attract jetsetters looking for a prolonged escape from their home countries as much as New Yorkers looking for a brief respite from the city’s grind. 

Aside from Sinephro, the night’s other standout set came courtesy of Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never. It marked the last show for his Again tour, which has been wowing audiences around the globe for more than a year, and felt like the platonic ideal of a C2C set: sonically shattering and visually intense. Lopatin makes brainy music, with beats that break into shards before melting into ooze and then reforming into abstract statues. He is a normal-looking dude just standing behind his equipment, so his gigs have the potential to be pretty tedious. But the Again shows are anything but. This is due to 1) the sound, which was loud and visceral enough to make my body tremor and 2) the visuals, which involved an artist named Freeka Tet setting up a diorama of Lopatin’s stage setup right next to Lopatin (replete with tiny Lopatin action figures), filming that diorama, and then throwing those images on to the big screen behind Lopatin. It’s weird. It’s meta. And it adds a sense of playfulness to the whole OPN project.

The OPN set included the fest’s most moving moments, too. One of them occurred when Lopatin took a beat to offer his gratitude to C2C founder Sergio Ricciardone, who died in March, at age 53, and the idea that Ricciardone wasn’t able to see his fest’s expansion to the States made it sting that much more. The other also played like a tribute, as the video for OPN’s 2016 track “Animals”—featuirng Val Kilmer sitting on a bed in a tracksuit—was shown onscreen. It was impossible not to think of the actor’s recent passing while taking in Lopatin’s gargantuan, decaying clouds of sound, and it felt like a weirdly apt way to honor the Hollywood outsider. 

After OPN’s set wrapped up around 1 a.m., about half of the crowd took off, leaving a relatively sparse showing for Two Shell. The duo were tasked with keeping the lingering folks alive and attentive for a bit longer, but they couldn’t help but look and sound dinky compared to the OPN assault. After breaking through in 2022 with a few brilliant tracks that combined the dancefloor-filling fun of Daft Punk with the brain-rot digital abundance of hyperpop, they released a not-as-brilliant album last year, dulling their thrill-of-the-new luster. All the while, they’ve remained generally anonymous, but their “mysteriousness” has become less intriguing and more tiresome the longer it goes on. They are rumored to have sent imposters to play previous live gigs, and really, I can’t say for certain if the two guys at C2C were the “real” Two Shell. (One guy had his face deep inside a hoodie, and the other was wearing a fedora and some kind of black face covering.) But I can say that their zippy bass tracks sounded small. And that their visuals were essentially non-existent, just a couple of overhead lights and a static logo. It wasn’t enough. 

I headed over to the second stage, which was mercifully less packed thanks to the dwindling crowd, to see the rap producer Evilgiane. It was much better, with the New York native’s billowing tracks hitting a sweet spot between dance-ready and ethereally blown. People were actually moving to the beats, too! It was past 2 a.m., though, and folks, including me, were fading. (Another tip for a future NYC C2C—a few light bites would not hurt!) 

As I walked back out into the grit and grime of no-man’s-land Queens, I considered if the New York C2C would make me want to go to the Italian one more or less. On one hand, the NYC version was not something anyone should go out of their way to travel to, which made me think that the same could be said of the Italian one. But then again, this C2C was so much smaller on every level, making me wonder what the genuine article was really like. I walked over to the closest gas station for some spicy peanuts, and wished with all of my heart that it was a trattoria instead.