By sound · 7 picks · Thu to Sun
Strings, drones, a sold-out matinee and the quiet end of the lineup, for the art-week crowd.
C2C puts experimental music on the big stages, not in a side room, and the art-week crowd knows it. This is the route through the weekend for anyone who'd rather stand still and listen: strings at OGR, a showcase from Nicolas Jaar's label before the club starts, a theatre at noon, and a Sunday made for it.
Wendy Eisenberg: folk songs that come apart into free jazz.
Wendy Eisenberg is a virtuoso guitarist who writes with a folk songwriter’s ear for melody and an improviser’s freedom to follow it somewhere new.
Their 37 minutes long track “mmeeaanniinngg bbuussiinneessss” can prove what we say.
Arrive on time, close your eyes and let their guitar gentlely pull you somewhere far away.
ML Buch with a string quartet: Danish guitar pop, rebuilt for strings
ML Buch plays a seven-string electric guitar in open tunings and builds slow, roomy songs from it, with synthetic tones and stacked voices; her double album 'Suntub' took five years and became a reference for Danish left-field pop. On the opening night she plays it with Quartetto Pessoa, a string quartet.
Other People's stage: poetry, Mapuche violin and incense
Nicolas Jaar's label hosts the Dazed Stage before Theo Parrish arrives. Fake Samo, a Chilean poet, cuts saxophone and drums into computer collage. Eli Wewentxu, a Mapuche violinist, plays alongside the txompe, a Mapuche mouth harp, in pieces shaped like spoken stories. Fronte Violeta, a Brazilian duo, work with feedback, gongs and amplified branches and feathers, and one edition of their record came with incense. Three hours of things you won't hear at another festival this year.
For fans of Nicolas Jaar
Smerz: a pop matinee in an old Turin theatre
Classical writing, computer music and pop sung with a straight face: the Norwegian duo Smerz make songs about apathy and love that sound like a chamber piece fell into a club. Their second album came out on Copenhagen's Escho, the label behind FINE and Elias Rønnenfelt on this lineup. It's sold out; the waiting list is open, and it's worth joining.
For fans of ML Buch, Oklou
Saturday's early hours: invented weather, and a guitar under water
Visible Cloaks open the main stage with glassy synths and faint pulses that sound like a weather system someone designed; the Pacific Northwest duo have recorded with Japanese ambient pioneer Yoshio Ojima. On the Dazed Stage, Rome's Chantssss plays slow pieces of acoustic guitar, blurred voice and reverb, with a low end that can still shake the hall. Arrive early.
Carl Stone, then Grouper: the computer, then the fog
Carl Stone has played computers live since 1986, long before laptops, and studied with Morton Subotnick. His sets grab tiny fragments of recorded music and stretch, pitch and stack them into dense, absorbing masses. Grouper follows with guitar and voice so washed out they barely seem there. Two ways of making very little fill a huge room.
Marina Herlop and Headache: voices that aren't quite human
A voice cut into fast, glossy shapes, singing in a language she made up: Marina Herlop is a classically trained Catalan pianist whose music leans on South Indian Carnatic rhythm. After her, Headache is Vegyn's soft side: blurry downtempo with someone else's lyrics read out by AI voices, uncanny and oddly moving. The end of the weekend for anyone who isn't going to dance.
Times, lineups and tickets are on each event's C2C Festival programme page. Songpot is independent of the festival.
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