C2C Festival Brought Its Borderless Experimental Spirit Back to New York

Club 2 Club Festival returned to New York on Friday for a second straight year, again taking over Knockdown Center in Queens as a kind of outpost ahead of the 25th anniversary edition of its flagship event in Italy this fall. Founded in Turin in 2002, C2C has spent more than two decades building a reputation around experimental pop, club music, and the artists who hover just outside the neatest genre lines.

That looseness can sound vague on paper. In practice, it gives the festival room to breathe. C2C’s idea of avant-pop is broad enough to hold Elias Rønnenfelt next to Los Thuthanaka, YHWH Nailgun, Aya, Nourished by Time, and Arca without the bill feeling random. If anything, the whole thing had the pleasantly specialized energy of music critic summer camp, which is a lot easier to live with than the influencer version most big-budget festivals seem to default to now.

Titanic (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

The first set I caught was Titanic, the Guatemalan-Venezuelan collaboration between vocalist-cellist Mabe Fratti and guitarist I. La Catolica. Nobody would reasonably call this club music, and yet the crowd on the concrete patio seemed to understand the assignment anyway. Purple lights washed over a duskier, hazy scene while people swayed to their muscular chamber rock. It felt less like a genre mismatch than proof that the festival’s boundaries were already gone.

I had technically already touched the event earlier in the afternoon at The Lot Radio in Brooklyn, where C2C had taken over the station with DJ sets from a handful of artists on the lineup. By the time I got there, though, the room was strangely empty. Maybe everyone had already left for the underscored DJ set about to happen a few L train stops away. I did too, eventually, putting C2C on pause until nightfall.

Elias Rønnenfelt (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

By the time I made it to the barricade at Knockdown Center’s ruins stage, the sky had already darkened. Titanic’s live set surprised me with its scale. HAGEN is a packed, stacked album, but onstage those songs seemed to open up and hit harder, with Fratti’s voice carrying and echoing through the space while her cello shifted quickly between fingerpicked and percussive lines. On songs like “Lágrima del sol” and “Gotera,” her strings and I. La Catolica’s guitar locked together in a way that felt immediate and physical.

Rønnenfelt came next, and he was far less restrained than I had expected. I’ve liked his solo work, especially last year’s Speak Daggers and the Dean Blunt-and-Vegyn-produced one-off “tears on his rings and chains,” but Iceage has always been the version of him I reach for first. Still, a solo set did not mean a soft one. Most of his songs, already woozier and more folk-leaning than his band work, hit live at roughly 1.5 speed or more, turning “USA Baby,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Blunt Force Trauma” into something almost feral. Manic, tactile, unpredictable, he made the whole thing crackle.

YHWH Nailgun (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

Then came YHWH Nailgun, who shut down the outdoor stage with an 11-minute set. Not a joke, not a typo, just 11 minutes. I had ducked into Knockdown’s Champagne Room before then to make use of the soon-to-close open bar, then sprinted back after hearing a friend tip me off to the micro-set. What they delivered was all-new material and all impact, even more battering and arrhythmic than 2025’s 45 Pounds, which I loved for stretching danceability and the idea of a hook until both nearly snapped.

As a live band, YHWH Nailgun sound locked in to the point of chaos. The precision is the point. The noise only works because everyone seems to know exactly where the floor is before they kick through it. When Zach Borzone and company walked off, some people around me wondered if an encore might include older songs. It didn’t. They said 11 minutes and meant it, down to the second.

Aya (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

As the ruins portion wound down, my friends and I headed inside for Aya, the English electronic producer whose music I’ve come to connect with more in person than on record, and not only because the Hexed! cover art makes me queasy. Her industrial sound felt even more abrasive live, but in a way that pulled the hooks closer instead of burying them. On her records, dread creeps in; onstage, it has already arrived.

I lost track of time drifting around the courtyard and catching up with friends, which meant I missed most of Avalon Emerson’s set. A real shame, considering Written Into Changes, her latest album, is a genuinely lovely stretch of earthy dreampop. I did, however, get to the barricade in time for Los Thuthanaka, the sibling duo of Chuquimamani Condori and Joshua Chuquimia-Crampton, whose self-titled, unmastered record became one of 2025’s most outside-the-box critical favorites.

Los Thuthanaka (Kevin Condon/C2C/Knockdown Center)

I’d seen Los Thuthanaka live late last year, and that first encounter clarified the spell pretty quickly. Their music seems to mess with time in the same way time messes with us. An hour, a day, a month, whatever it is, they can make repetition feel both fixed and unstable. The same riff can circle for what feels like forever, and by the time you realize it, you’re somewhere else entirely. It’s trance music in the most literal sense.

Before C2C, the first time I saw Nourished by Time was nearly three years ago at the now-defunct Pitchfork Music Festival. Back then, after Erotic Probiotic 2, Marcus Brown played an early-afternoon set that felt almost quaint, even a little shabby chic, though it also read like a signpost. Watching him open a festival, it was easy to imagine him closing one someday. Last Friday, he was doing exactly that sort of thing, with a midnight mainstage set at Knockdown Center that made his retro-futuristic R&B feel huge. The sound hit the room like disco light, scattered in every direction.

He opened with “Automatic Love” and “Idiot In The Park,” a brutal little one-two from last year’s The Passionate Ones, but the song that hit me hardest was “Shed That Fear,” the track that first pulled me into Brown’s work. The chorus and bass seemed to bloom from somewhere behind my eyes. With my eyes closed, the room turned into something like a silent disco inside my skull.

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

Coming down from that set was not easy. By then it was well past midnight and I had been on my feet for most of 12 hours, kept going by adrenaline, peach-grapefruit tequila-Redbulls, and a few puffs from a friend’s vape bought from the bathroom attendant for $20 and apparently flavored like someone had bitten into a watermelon Jolly Rancher and then spit it back at you. Still, I was determined to make Arca.

Her instrumental introduction was nearly as long as YHWH Nailgun’s entire set, all guttural basslines and crackling low-end rolling through the room like weather building. It was the right kind of overstatement for Arca, the Venezuelan experimental electronic pioneer, whose stage presence was every bit as absorbing as you’d hope. “Good evening, Nueva York!” she shouted, and if that was a wink, it landed. “I love you guys, have fun!”

From there the room shifted under its own weight. House lights dimmed. Purple columns cut through the dark. The beat came in heavy, textured, and constantly changing shape. At different moments, the set felt like an abandoned factory rave, a bat cave fashion week afterparty, or some haunted club crawl gone slightly wrong. More than anything, it was a reminder of what C2C keeps proving in New York: pop can take almost any form you want, and the border between scenes, genres, and expectations is often thinner than people like to admit.