At the southernmost Metro stop in Turin, Italy, Lingotto’s fading star attraction towers four stories high across a half-kilometer of urban space. The architectural marvel, also named Lingotto, stands as a totem to the car industry that’s behind the area’s thriving population and modest wealth, as well as Italy’s decorated history in the arts. Upon its completion in 1923, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the patriarch of Italian Futurism, claimed the magnificent Fiat factory as “the first invention of futurist construction.” Although the line stopped churning in the early ’80s, Lingotto has since become a locus for new waves of futurism at electronic music’s vanguard.
In the early hours one Saturday a couple weeks back, in a hangar attached to the old factory, I stood among Italian dancers entranced by this forward-facing music, and wondered what future it envisaged. I’d observed the usual responses on the ground—4 a.m. gazes adrift to Autechre’s sonic neurology; grimacing faces rapt as Jesse Kanda projected goat-birthing clips behind his closest collaborator, Arca; starry-eyed folks immersed in Amnesia Scanner’s cyborg panic—but at Club to Club, the diverse dance festival that runs here every November, it’s hard not to see traces of futurism’s core principles: to blitz one’s heritage, to reject expertise in favor of experimentation, to be dazzled by science and the mystique of machines.
A vaguely futurist doctrine has characterized Western dance music since early techno, when mechanical repetition doubled as an assault on classicism. Today, there’s a more complex landscape—the dance nostalgia industry is indisputably prosperous—but the movement remains attractive to producers. “I always found in futurists this chaotic feeling of speed and contrast,” said Powell, whose Friday night set evoked such a feeling. “Just this fucking restless, anything-goes energy. I always found that exciting.”
The Italian Futurists, led by the radical Marinetti, put out a litany of verbose manifestos between 1909 and 1915, as well as a futurist cookbook, whose unlikely objectives included abolishing cutlery and warning Italians against the villainy of pasta. The futurist philosophy aspired to absolve Italy of its Bell’Italia heritage, as the country entered another century overshadowed by two untouchable renaissance eras: Ancient Rome and the actual Renaissance. Like Nietzsche, the futurists believed that art represented society’s cutting edge; they painted, using dynamic effects and sometimes vulgar color, with a desire to “shape consciousness” and advance humanity, again referencing Nietzsche and his Übermensch concept of a secular value system. At a time of chronic flux in pre-Mussolini Italy, the futurist dream of fearlessly assimilating machines into society, replacing everything from music to moonlight, was as novel as it was prescient.
“If you think about what was going on artistically in Europe at the time, it was post-Impressionism, it was still much of a muchness,” Powell said. “People were just refining something that was evolving over the previous 60 years. And that can be true of a lot of dance music, too.” For Powell, futurism remains relevant for its urgent disavowal of antiquarianism. “What you see now is artists—well, I wouldn't call them artists, but producers—refining something which is to many people canonical, it’s precious. And I just cannot understand where the interest in that lies. Sometimes you do need to approach these things with violence, to create bigger steps forward.”
Powell at Club to Club. (Photo by Andrea Macchia)
Musicians across genres have long indulged in the romance of machines, particularly in relation to working-class industry. “When I started to make music, so many people were drawn to this imagery of factories—Factory Records, Throbbing Gristle,” Arto Lindsay, who recorded with no wave group DNA in the late-’70s, told me after his Club to Club noise set. “It just never caught my imagination.” Lindsay began to explore Manhattan loft parties during that era (and has, more recently, warmed to infamous Berlin mega-club Berghain); he recalls formative disco experiences in Larry Levan’s dance utopia Paradise Garage. “That was where I completely just got off on volume,” he said, smiling. “I don't know what drug I was on. The speakers were as big as these walls. And I was with a girl and she was like, ‘Let’s go away!’ And I was like, ‘Let’s go closer!’”
Eighties New York havens like Danceteria and the Paradise Garage helped spawn a handful of U.K. copycats. Many, including the Hacienda, would become catalysts of the acid house boom. But British dance utopianism peaked when the lawless, collective explosion of full-blown rave culture arrived a decade into Thatcherism. Crisis points have a way of teasing out imaginative new realities, whether it’s the transcendence of hierarchies and political systems, as in rave, or the dystopian conclusion of present regimes. Rather than flights of fancy, these visions often resemble the last islands of sanity in a corrupt world.
New Warp signee Gaika errs toward dystopianism—but his music, a ruin of dubstep vastness and disembodied dancehall, plants itself in the present. “London is dystopian now,” he told me in a hotel restaurant before his Club to Club set. “We are being watched now. You walk through the airport, you see these guys in body armor, massive guns, laser-sighted shit. It's like, what the fuck? Have we just walked into the fucking Guyver, bro?”
The term Gaika has formulated for his immersive, London-centric aesthetic is “ghetto-futurism”—a concept he describes as “the hood dreaming with machines.” Kids using command-line interfaces, programming drum machines, “Wiley and them making shit on PlayStation”—Gaika sees these as symbols of possibility for the working-class and communities of color. “We suddenly have all this power,” he said. “In a lot of ways, music is about the flow and transportation of information. Suddenly now we have these computational machines that can process things in a way that is wild.”
With the internet, he adds, “We’ve put this multiplier on our collective intelligence. You put that multiplier on our ability to compute information, it means that naturally the world’s gonna change, and suddenly the gatekeepers don’t have that much power. We’re seeing that fall away with a certain rupture, friction. Trouble has been caused by that. But power will move, is moving. Inch by inch, I believe the world is getting better. But in those inches, it's harrowing.”
Gaika at Club to Club. (Photo by Daniele Baldi)
For all its talk of demolition and radical reinvention, futurism rarely seemed a utopian pursuit, though its social imagination never faltered. While the futurists’ masculine bravado now seems embarrassingly problematic—Marinetti sought to glorify war, as well as “scorn for woman”—above all they believed in art’s transformative quality, a theme explored in their creative reimagining of the human body. Compare Umberto Boccioni’s “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” which depicts a sculpted, metallic Übermensch mid-stride, to Jesse Kanda’s fluid, sexually distorted body forms in Arca’s artwork. What their futuristic perversions share is a desire to distort the human form to fit new, enhanced psychologies.
Producers like Arca, Elysia Crampton, and Amnesia Scanner—who all played at Club to Club—use technology to immerse themselves in explorations of identity. With its manipulation of sound, space, and rhythm as a means of sculpting new realities, these artists’ music totally exceeds the scope of acoustic instruments—even moreso than in techno, where psychedelic effects simply decorate the beat. The visual and sonic result is a sense of interior utopianism, harnessing elements of futurist sheen and techno-humanism to expand what people are allowed to be.
In the expanse of Lingotto, where a rooftop racetrack serves as a crowning tribute to its industrial history, these artists congregate. “Torino is famous for being a city where you can find magic,” Sergio Ricciardone, the elegantly suited Club to Club founder, told me backstage. “There are two triangles in Europe, with white magic and black magic. Torino is the only city that is both. White magic and black magic. Utopian and dystopian. We try to combine these elements across the festival.”
Or even, sometimes, within a single set. Early in his Club to Club performance, Arca let a piercing buzz reverberate as he took center stage and sang a frisson-inducing aria. Half an hour later, he was commanding us to “shake that fucking booty” before blasting Armand Van Helden’s “You Don’t Know Me.” It’s unlikely Marinetti would approve—Van Helden’s penchant for form and melody is perhaps the pop-house equivalent of eating pasta with cutlery—but such a performance goes beyond capital-F Futurism and dreams of a warmer, not-too-distant future alongside the machines. In any case, as strobes danced overhead, the young Italians seemed happy to make a temporary home in the present tense.