If that sounds cerebral, let’s cut to the chase with some previous headliners: Caroline Polachek, Arca, Sophie and Floating Points have all had standout sets at recent editions. Knockdown Center regulars should recognize these names from our own lineups, and will probably be fans of just a few other C2C standouts like, oh, Aphex Twin, Jamie XX and Autechre. So we’re very excited to announce that their debut US date will be at Knockdown Center next May with Oneohtrix Point Never headlining alongside Nala Sinephro, Two Shell and many more.
C2C succinctly describes their curatorial approach with the term “avant-pop,” even going so far as to pen a book articulating their ethos. It’s an ambiguous genre they didn’t invent, but by claiming it so directly, it raises the question: what is avant-pop exactly? The festival maps a wide-ranging ecosystem of artists whose work is informed by experimental countercultures and cross-currents while maintaining a bold, accessible sheen.
“Like pop, avant-pop is an umbrella,” writes author Jazz Montrow. “Neither is a genre unto itself. Contrast avant-pop with the young genre of hyperpop. This Internet-bred style combines compositional nous with post-genre anarchy, reflecting the availability of seemingly all music, all at once. Nonetheless, hyperpop’s hyperactive, borderless anti-style is now a style in itself… Avant-pop, on the other hand, contains the possibility for multiple, successive iterations – contains hyperpop itself. Yesterday’s avant-pop is not today’s avant-pop… Unlike pop, which draws the present out of the past, avant-pop sees the future in the past.”
C2C’s loose conceptual rubric allows a heady mixture of breakout and niche to coexist in loving, mixtape-esque juxtaposition. Their settings also help elevate all performances. C2C’s 20th anniversary edition was held in a former Fiat factory, which was repurposed in the mid ‘80s as an arts hub. In this stunning, sprawling space, artists were given free reign. Some, like Romy (of the xx) and Arca delivered standout sets. Others, like Dean Blunt, pushed the envelope; Blunt, never one to turn down an opportunity to prank, DJ’ed a set of aggressive, overwhelmingly loud punk and metal. It was nothing if not a conversation starter.
Like Krakow’s Unsound, another Knockdown Center sometimes-collaborator, C2C is able to punch far above its weight in its hometown. Turin, while not a backwater, isn’t a renowned hub of international culture. And yet each year C2C fills an airplane hanger or two with eager attendees, often for artists with zero radio play and a relatively underground profile. One of our staff members was at their 2012 edition and recalls a cavernous space so vast that, when you first entered it, the sound was completely reverberated and blurred. Only as you got closer to the stage did the music become discernible. And, having wound through an audience of thousands, you were greeted in the end with not a rising pop star, but instead underground “techno shaman” James Holden.
The NY lineup is then an exquisite encapsulation of the C2C approach. Few artists embody the avant-pop prompt quite as well as Oneohtrix Point Never. On the surface, there’s very little “pop” in his music. He’s most known for ornate, elliptical modern synth-prog experimentalism, but that description falls so clumsily short of conveying the scale, depth and, indeed, popular appeal of his music. From a palette of relatively obscure, left-field sounds, Oneohtrix has found a way to express a sweeping, cinematic and widely-loved take on technological ennui, a digitally mediated society, ‘80s nostalgia and so much more. For his core fans, Oneohtrix’s music sounds like what life feels like today.
Nala Sinephro, on the other hand, is one of the leading voices in a very welcome jazz renaissance. The London-based artist draws on the work of spiritual jazz luminaries like Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and Khan Jamal (with a dose of Terry Riley, Hiroshi Yoshimura and Dorthy Ashby), charting a path from those towering legacies into our modern era with such confidence and grace that you wonder why someone else didn’t do it sooner.
Two Shell, on the other hand, emerged from UK’s syncopated bass music underground a few years ago, quickly seizing the moment with a run of EPs that jammed together hyperpop’s bubblegum surfaces, EDM’s frenetic obsession with adrenaline and a strange, impish jesterism that subverted every trope they could get their hands on. A series of disruptions - including gigs where other people were sent to perform in their place - turned just about every head in the underground. When asked about their breakout Boiler Room performance, where whoever was DJing was almost certainly pantomiming to a backing track, they said: “mr officer, we shalt speak only the truth. we like to party. first time playing in a hot country when it’s usually raining at home we’d be letting the lads back home freezing there knackers off sat in the rain down if we didn’t give it a little tickle for a show like that. as for the mixing, we’ve had serious operators in the uk underground respecting and protecting our woop. we could mix with the lights off and one shoe on if we had too. have probably done it at the stone circle more than once, ya get mee?”
The rest of the lineup continues this exploratory approach; evilgiane and John Glacier have already been announced, with more on the way. If you’ve been following Knockdown Center’s own Outline series, or if you’ve checked out our collaborations with Pitchfork, Colors or even James Blake, you’re well equipped to dive headfirst into the world of C2C.