Described by the Pitchfork blogger Jazz Monroe as the “ne-plus-ultra festival of avant-garde eclecticism,” the C2C festival and its organizers decided to try their hand, last weekend, at putting on a rave inside in an empty warehouse space in nearby Queens, after spending some twenty years doing the same inside converted Fiat factory in the northern Italian city of Turin. This had brought the promoters to the Knockdown Center, a club on the border of Ridgewood and Maspeth, built inside a shuttered door factory that once, purportedly, claimed to have once invented the “knock-down frame.” For their U.S. debut, they booked, among others: the trendy British DJ pair Two Shell, the prominent Scottish DJ Kode9, the London jazz artist Nala Sinephro, and Daniel Lopatin, a bearded cult electronic artist who lives in Brooklyn, has scored various Safdie brothers movies and also makes songs with the Weeknd. Lopatin was, however, largely playing songs from his latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never, called “Again.” On stage, he was accompanied only by a French man in a hoodie and glasses who went by the name Freeka Tet, described by Spike magazine as “a creative mercenary.” Tet was employed filming a puppet version of Lopatin, or sometimes a puppet guitar, with his phone, the footage of which was projected onto the stage. Later, Tek left the stage and the videos were replaced by enormous stills of the late actor Val Kilmer. The music itself was loud, animated by a kind of fragmented, sometimes deafening, nostalgia.

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan & Michelle Maier.