C2C Brought Its Borderless Club Logic Back to New York at Knockdown Center

Club 2 Club Festival returned to New York on Friday for a second straight year, turning Knockdown Center in Queens into another outpost for the Turin-born event as it builds toward the 25th anniversary of its flagship Italian edition this fall. Founded in 2002, C2C has spent more than two decades shaping itself as a place where experimental pop and club music can sit beside one another without either one having to explain itself too much. That sounds like industry copy until you hear how loosely, and how usefully, the festival treats labels like “avant-pop.” The range can look slippery on paper. In practice, it gives the whole thing a curatorial confidence that a lot of larger festivals still struggle to fake.

Maybe that is why C2C can feel, at least to an out-of-town critic in the crowd, a little like music critic summer camp. That is not nothing. Compared with the flattened influencer-festival default of the moment, there is something refreshing about a lineup that seems built around curiosity rather than product placement. The day began before the main event, with C2C commandeering the Lot Radio airwaves in Brooklyn for a stretch of DJ sets. The station was strangely quiet when I arrived midway through the takeover, and before long I bailed for the L train and saved the rest of the festival for the evening at Knockdown.

Titanic (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

The first set I caught indoors was Titanic, the Guatemalan-Venezuelan collaboration of vocalist-cellist Mabe Fratti and guitarist I. La Catolica. Nobody would reasonably file them under club music, but by the time I got there the concrete patio outside had taken on a dusky, almost nocturnal pulse, with purple light and people swaying to their muscular chamber rock. Onstage, the duo’s sound felt even larger. Tracks from HAGEN, which on record is dense and tightly packed, loosened up live and hit with more force. Fratti’s voice stretched high and bright across the space while her cello could turn percussive in a blink, and songs like “Lágrima del sol” and “Gotera” made plain how fully the strings and guitars can fuse into something that is both elegant and physically bracing.

Elias Rønnenfelt (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

Elias Rønnenfelt followed, and if his solo work has often seemed more woozy and folk-leaning than the punishing physicality of Iceage, his set at Knockdown made a quick case for the opposite reading. I’ve liked Speak Daggers, his album from last year, and the Dean Blunt and Vegyn-produced one-off “tears on his rings and chains,” but I had still expected something gentler without Iceage behind him. Instead, the songs came on fast, often at a speed that felt closer to 1.5x than restraint, which turned “USA Baby,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Blunt Force Trauma” into especially volatile versions of themselves. His stage presence remains what it has always been: restless, tactile, hard to pin down. Whether he is working in punk, solo material, or something between the two, Rønnenfelt still sounds like he is striking a spark and refusing to let it settle into one shape.

YHWH Nailgun (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

Then came YHWH Nailgun, who shut down the outdoor stage with an 11-minute set that did exactly what it said on the tin. I had made a brief detour through Knockdown Center’s “Champagne Room” for the soon-to-end open bar, then sprinted back outside on a tip that the local headfuck-punks were about to play a micro-set. The reward was nearly 10 minutes of new material that sounded even more battering and off-kilter than 2025’s 45 Pounds, an album I admired for how far it pushed the idea of danceability and the shape of a hook. Live, the band were in unnerving sync, producing the kind of chaos that only comes from extreme precision. When Zach Borzone and company walked off, people around me wondered if there might be an encore and, maybe, a return to older songs. There was not. Eleven minutes meant eleven minutes.

Aya (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

By the time the festival shifted indoors, I was more than ready for a room that could hold a more abrasive kind of pressure. Aya’s electronic music has always felt easier to appreciate live for me, and that is not just because the Hexed! album cover is hard to look at for too long. In performance, the industrial edges sharpen further, and what on record can feel like dread creeping in becomes something more immediate, already in the room and pressing on the walls. I had also lost track of time in the courtyard, which meant I missed most of Avalon Emerson’s set, unfortunate given how lovely Written Into Changes is as a piece of earthy dreampop. Still, I was back at the barricade for Los Thuthanaka, the sibling duo of Chuquimamani Condori and Joshua Chuquimia-Crampton, whose self-titled, unmastered album was one of 2025’s most unexpected critical breakthroughs.

Los Thuthanaka (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

I had seen Los Thuthanaka live late last year, and that performance had already clarified what makes them so disorienting and so compelling. Their music seems to alter your sense of time while it is happening. A riff can repeat and repeat until it feels motionless, and then, somehow, the repetition starts to feel like transformation. It is the kind of set that makes you lose track of how long you have been standing there, only to realize the spell worked because you have been pulled somewhere without moving very far at all.

Nourished By Time (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

Before C2C, the first time I saw Nourished by Time was almost three years ago at the now-defunct Pitchfork Music Festival, where Marcus Brown was opening an early-afternoon slot in support of Erotic Probiotic 2. Even then, there was something almost modest about the way he was presented, though the music already suggested a far bigger future. Last Friday, after midnight on Knockdown Center’s mainstage, that future looked obvious. Brown’s retro-futuristic R&B filled the room with a sparkling wash, the kind of sound that seems designed to ricochet off every surface. He opened with “Automatic Love” and “Idiot In The Park,” two highlights from last year’s The Passionate Ones, but the real cycle-closing moment was “Shed That Fear,” the track that first made me lock into his work. Its chorus and heavy bass felt less like they were coming from the PA than from somewhere inside my own head.

By then, I was running on fumes. It was well past midnight, and after nearly 12 hours on my feet, my system was being held together by adrenaline, peach-grapefruit tequila-Redbulls, and whatever questionable vape juice a bathroom attendant had sold a friend for $20. Still, there was no real question about staying for Arca’s headlining set. Her instrumental introduction stretched almost as long as YHWH Nailgun’s entire performance, all guttural low-end and cracking bass rolling like weather across the room. It was a fitting buildup for the Venezuelan experimental electronic pioneer, whose stage presence remains as commanding as ever.

“Good evening, Nueva York!” she called out, sounding like she was letting the room in on the joke. “I love you guys, have fun!” From there, the house lights dropped, purple spotlights scattered the space, and the beat hit with a physical pressure that kept changing shape. Arca’s set moved through moods that could have been called abandoned factory rave, bat cave fashion week, or a club night with a haunted house problem. That volatility is part of her point, and part of C2C’s too. The festival keeps insisting that pop music can keep stretching without snapping. New York got a reminder of that again on Friday.