Terraforma 2022

What memories. I've never experienced an event with a combination of music and suggestive location quite like Amnesia Scanner at Terraforma. In the woods of the stunning baroque Villa Arconati, in Bollate (Milan), the performance by the ethereal Lafawndah (vainly backed by the drumming of Valentina Megaletti and Sebastien Forrester) has just ended, and the clearing in front of the tiny stage where she performed has emptied out almost completely. The crowd, mostly in their twenties and thirties, swarms toward the drink stands, chatting in a mix of European languages in which Italian seems to be only a relative majority. From the depths beyond the tunnel of lights connecting the main stage to the park's entrance avenue, bursts of dull thuds begin to draw the crowd's attention. I follow the throng, quickening my pace a little: I came mainly to catch the performance of the Finnish duo Amnesia Scanner, and I'm keen to grab a good spot.

The crush of people is almost at a standstill at the entrance to a maze. The sound, which has grown more hammering and industrial, comes from the center. How on earth do you get to the stage? For a few disorienting minutes, the stream of bewildered listeners floods every passage and dead end of the hedge maze, while a huge totem of speakers and screens bombards everyone with industrial percussion and monochrome flashes. The feeling is, inevitably, both confusing and galvanizing at the same time. After a couple of dead-end turns, I reach a gap in the hedge that reveals the full cylindrical scaffolding emitting the sounds. Of the musicians, no trace at all. The woods, the maze, the starry sky suggest an association: that faceless monument is the live-show equivalent of the enigmatic pavilion on the cover of "Horse Rotorvator" by Coil. The sound, murky and brutal, confirms the evocation.

Music and visuals are a total assault. Distorted faces and hardcore techno blows, rotting reggaeton and tortured eyes straight out of "A Clockwork Orange". Every so often, a voice transformed into pure cyberpunk spectral form. It's a deconstructed club whirlpool that leaves little room for imagination, but plenty for suggestion. For the whole first half hour of the set, there's no sign of a human presence on stage.

Then a guy appears, sitting on a piece of scaffolding, seemingly minding his own business. Someone in the crowd must have thought: well, since there's nothing to see down here anyway, why not watch from above? No wait, he's holding something that looks like a microphone. He leans toward us and says hello: "Hi". What follows is a half hour led by the figure, who (as we learn from the promotional materials) goes by the moniker Freeka Tet, and who soon whips out a disturbing fake arm used as a direct extension of his real one. It's a more song-based stretch of the set (so to speak), in which fractured beats and granular synthesis are still present but give way to a greater presence of the voice, still transfigured beyond intelligibility by digital effects. Having a frontman to focus attention on makes things feel more conventional, and the music too seems to grow less evocative, a kind of cyborg version of the Animal Collective of days gone by. When the rhythm finally dies down, the vocalist explains: "The guys are somewhere down there", pointing to the area outside the maze where the flashes that occasionally lit up the scene were coming from.

We head back to the main stage, because the highlight of the evening is about to arrive. Completely invisible due to the lack of lighting and their ground-level positioning, on the narrow triangular stage of the main stage, Autechre are ready to go. Honestly, I don't know what to expect: I stopped following them around the dazzling days of "Confield" and "Draft 7.30", and in recent years I've carefully avoided subjecting myself to works unanimously hailed as "monolithic" and impenetrable. Fingers crossed: whatever happens, it'll be an experience. And an experience it certainly was, if boredom, bewilderment and dismay count as such. A good hour or so of uninterrupted flow of techno fragments, in which not a single timbre, melody, rhythm, or even mood emerges as distinctive for more than a few seconds.

A single cell keeps resurfacing with some frequency amid the magma, and it's the most clichéd four-to-the-floor beat imaginable. As often happens with hyper-elaborate constructions, the mind sweeps away the articulations it perceives as random, and highlights the structures it manages to grasp. In this case — my own limitation — in all that alien shifting I can only make out extremely banal patterns. For a while I try, attempting to find a thread, and at the same time to spot the musicians or at least their equipment; then I give up, slip out of the crowd and just watch. Some try to dance, inventing a tempo more by following others than the nonexistent beat. Many go off to get a drink. A couple of kids, off to the side, put on a fairly successful dance of broad, slow gestures: it would have worked just as well without the music playing underneath. After a stretch of time that, without a watch, felt endless, the electronic mumbling starts to thin out: a few minutes later, the speakers go silent. A loud round of applause comes from the crowd. Enthusiasm? Relief? That too is impossible to tell.

I head to the car. It's twelve forty a.m., and tomorrow at six a train is waiting for me from Bergamo. As I cross back through the tunnel of lights and then the courtyards and halls of the villa, from a distance the muffled beat of Voices From The Lake begins to reach me. I think back on what I've just experienced: three hours or so of crowd-bathing in an Erasmus fusion atmosphere, made up of passionate young fans as much as kids drawn by the setting, the camping, the nearby city. More than an ordinary artist-focused festival, it felt like one long legalized rave party, with invisible musicians and a very bold electronic lineup, but utterly unsuited to a rave. Who knows if, by the end of the three days, the people in the igloo tents will be satisfied: two full nights still remain, and I'll be missing them. On the short stretch of the Autostrada dei Laghi I drive before merging onto the A4, whether it's the hour or the conflicting feelings, the official anthem of nights spent driving comes back to me: "Chi si contenta gode / Così così".

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