Elettrowave

Let's get one thing straight. It's true that Elettrowave is an event spread across two days, but I only attended the Friday 14th evening, on paper by far the most enticing. And besides, try to understand: the night of the 15th mainly features Alex Neri and the Tenax crew. Good, sure, but I catch them at least once every two months, and where I live that same evening there's Eva Henger on: life is all about priorities...

But let's get to how the evening went. Arezzo Wave, of which Elettrowave is an offshoot, serves up an aperitif that's worth the main course. My travelling companion and I certainly aren't going to pass it up, especially given the affinity between what's on offer on the stadium's Main Stage and what we'll be enjoying later that night at the Centro Affari e Convegni. Because of various delays we miss CocoRosie, of whom we only catch the last song. They seem more at ease than when I saw them in Turin a year ago (a show ruined by an awful, overbearing MC), but I can't really say much more. Shame.

A few minutes later Carl Craig takes the stage, the last true living legend of Detroit, and it's clear from the outset that tonight he'll be blanketing Arezzo in stardust. Dressed entirely in white, he stands at the centre of the stage, working two laptops and various gadgets. To his left a keyboardist, to his right a drummer, both hailing from Motown. In his set Craig chooses to treat us to a musical translation of his wandering spirit. What emerges are sinuous infiltrations of scalding ice with a cosmic breath, a pulsing Göttsching-esque unicum that binds together tracks which, though different, share a sense of constant growth and an unmatched refinement that never loses its techno soul, not even when the beats grow more rarefied.

About halfway through the show (roughly an hour in total), he stops and speaks. He thanks us and promises a second half hour of romance… He asks the keyboardist to play something romantic, and – I swear to you, guys! – he starts singing a pure soul number, in a voice deep enough to get the job done: he's no Isaac Hayes, but it's brilliant. The crowd is stunned. In the song he tells us he loves us, all the while laughing, winking, buttering us up: he's a leopard, and he's already sunk his claws into our little techno hearts.

Then the climb starts again. The keyboard turns even more jazzy, the drummer plays around with his electronic gear, and the crescendo of sound and emotion becomes unstoppable. Even the man at the centre of the stage feels the tension building, and he goes to work on the microphone again, looping breaths and short bursts of screams, before launching into a metronomic spoken-word passage over one of the last tracks.

By now it's official: he's come to bring us love. Capital-L Love, in fact. The ending is perfect: the moment the instruments fall silent, his little son runs onto the stage to hug him.

For Laurent Garnier, the mission now looks close to impossible. A live show worthy of what came before it means giving everything, and then some. Lately, Garnier has often been the star of perfectly decent dj sets — nothing to complain about, but a far cry from those wildly generous sessions of some years back, the kind that won over your soul before your legs. Seeing him live again in 2004, even then he struck me as a lesser Garnier, entertaining but somehow held back. So I'm not getting my hopes up too high. Tonight our man is performing alongside Norwegian jazz pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, with whom he collaborated on "The Cloud Making Machine", last year's album. They're not alone on stage either, as saxophonist Philippe Nadau is there to back them up. We all know how risky ventures like this can be. It takes no time at all to slide into Ibiza-style compilation territory. On top of that, technology itself seems intent on spelling disaster: major sampler trouble, which gives up the ghost on the very first track. Everything grinds to a halt, and Garnier asks the crowd for five minutes to fix the fault.

The five minutes turn into a quarter of an hour, maybe more, and then comes the grim news: "I can't get it working, I can only do five tracks, that's honestly all I can do." All the ingredients are there for the kind of disastrous night musicians recount in interviews when asked about their worst gig ever. And yet here comes the slap in the face that reveals just how great Garnier is, both as a musician and as a man. The old raver lion shakes out his mane, and suddenly he's the kid again who, back in Paris when he was still a nobody, used to treat the crowd to epic one-night sets and then invite the first three survivors who volunteered to jump in his car for a weekend of pure destruction in London, leaving right away.

With what's left of his gear, Garnier throws everything he's got into a set that still runs to about an hour, packing in every ingredient he has left. Breakbeat or squared-off four-to-the-floor rhythms, physicality, Wesseltoft's furious work beside him, Nadau's obsessive, hypnotic horn lines, and even an MC borrowed from backstage for an improvisation on the second track. He wrings everything out of himself, out of the musicians playing with him, out of the machines, out of the crowd, with a blazing performance. On stage, everyone gives their all for the final goal. Down on the floor, the goal is achieved, and the toxins are nothing but a memory.

Where Craig aimed for an untouchable elegance and atmosphere, Garnier chooses to set the whole thing on fire, leaving no survivors in his wake. Two wildly different shows, yet equally thrilling: it would be unfair, and simply wrong, to try to pick a winner.

Once Mister F Com's set wraps up, we make our way, unhurried, to the other side of town. Elettrowave kicks off at midnight, but the big names don't show up until three, a good half hour after we've passed through the gates.

The Centro Affari e Convegni venue houses no fewer than four stages, spread across as many rooms, plus a fifth decompression room where chill-out music plays. A kind of more composed rave, you might say. The biggest names perform in the Main Room, while the Super Room hosts a bit of homegrown Italian techno. The room called Different Beats speaks for itself, while the Cabaret Electronique showcases young up-and-comers.

As soon as we arrive, we're drawn to a French duo playing on the small Cabaret Electronique stage. They're called Horny Chicken, a colourful pair whose spirit is obvious from the moment they walk out. Mirrored Cartman-cop-style RayBans, sweat, wild, possessed gestures. She's decked out in a porno-lolita red minidress with white polka dots and a zipper, he's in a tank top, shaved head, and the ultimate tattoo: three big black squares on his right arm. Their music is just as extreme. Techno with pounding rhythms (think Miss Djax, that's the vibe) paired with silly jingles, yodelling, and sugary vocals. Somewhere between hilarious and hallucinatory. They leave us with a passionate kiss. Fun.

Horny Chicken's set makes us forget that Plaid have already been playing in the Main Room for a quarter of an hour. Their plan is as simple as it is effective: bring their brand-new release to Arezzo too, the cd/dvd "Greedy Baby", the result of a collaboration with director/videomaker Bob Jaroc, who's also here tonight to accompany Handley and Turner's sounds with some remixes of his visuals.

The sound is rough, hard-edged, and yet it never loses that robotic melodic touch Plaid have always been masters of. Their live show is sharp, too in our face for us to feel like leaving to check out what Morgan Geist is up to on the "Different Beats" stage. The better-known half of Metro Area will have to wait until next time to get reviewed on Onda Rock…

In fact there are plenty of interesting names booked for three o'clock: we also have to give up on the excellent Who Made Who. Meanwhile the sounds and images keep flowing, and the immersion is total: we're not thinking about anything else. On one side, Plaid's angular yet elegant, almost danceable electronics; on the other, Bob Jaroc's videos, the perfect accompaniment to the duo's mix of ecstasy and protest. Plaid, after all, have long since embarked on a political path (remember the "Itsu" video?), and now that commitment becomes even more explicit. The war in Iraq, Bush, CNN, human contradictions all flash past at high speed. Everything flows by, like the buildings and houses that accompany another track: Handley, Turner and Jaroc seduce and unsettle in a live show with real impact, sonic as much as visual, far more powerful than we could have expected. They close with a seismic, monstrously powerful breakbeat track, the one that, more than any other, will make us sweat tonight. Devastating. Simply devastating.

Once Plaid are done, it's Carl Craig's turn, this time for a ninety-minute dj set. It's impossible not to love the guy: he's generous, and after that stellar live show he still has so much more to give us — and himself. In the same night. Compared to the live show, his set leans more towards a techno with fewer compromises: the sound gets drier, as is only natural. Craig is both narrator and part of techno's own history, and he knows it well. That's why, in a tight, cohesive set, he slips in, early on, a luxurious vintage Juan Atkins cut, and, just a few minutes before wrapping up, drops his tribute to his mentor: a stripped-down remix of the legendary "Strings of Life", THE all-time classic by Derrick May. And afterwards (it's already quarter past five) he even stops to sign a few autographs and pose for photos. Exceptional once again.

Closing out our night is a live performance by a very young talent who's already partly delivered on his promise. Jimmy Edgar, also from Detroit, recently out with "Color Strip". The kid knows his stuff and shows it, managing to keep the tension high even after the emotional whirlwind we've all just lived through, both as witnesses and participants. Armed, among other things, with an Ambra-circa-"Non è la Rai"-style microphone and a vocoder, he rattles off oblique rhythms and melodies, at times almost funky, in his own personal take on the Detroit sound: we like it even more than on record. Even when he revisits tracks from his album, he picks the punchiest ones and sharpens them further. The techno-pop of "Heart Beat Sexual", dropped almost right at the start, is as simple as it is irresistible. The live set flies by, revealing a talent that was at times overshadowed on "Color Strip". The kid doesn't wow us the way the acts before him did, but he's got the goods: let's hope he doesn't lose his way, that would be a real shame. To close, the gem: as my watch hits five fifty-five, "My Beatz" comes crashing down on the crowd, showing no mercy to anyone, a perfect, relentless dance machine. The crowd calls him back and he returns for "I Wanna Be Your STD", probably his best-known track. Excellent stuff.

We leave when it's already daylight: a few people stick around for the more or less "after" party set up in another room, but that's just scraps thrown to those who really can't sleep. Finding a ride to the station is impossible.

Oh, what's that? You want to know about Eva Henger the night after? Come on, you all know what she's like...

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