Sometime past midnight last Friday, Loraine James's "Glitch Bitch" gurgled out the door of one of the hulking warehouse spaces at Kamienna 16, the sprawling industrial park that's home to Unsound's club events. In the other warehouse, down a long outdoor corridor lined by food stalls and punters chatting and smoking, the Polish artist KRENZ let loose a juddering blend of jungle and instrumental hip-hop under the red light. The crowd, roughly half local and half international, wore jackets and scarves against the chill even on the dance floor—that was, except for Alicja Kozakiewicz, a longtime member of the Unsound family and former organiser of the festival's daytime program, who drifted through the scene in a white sequined dress.

"Is that your wedding dress?" a moustachioed passer-by inquired.

Her answer was complex. The dress, Kozakiewicz explained, was part of a series of outfits planned throughout the festival, each one referencing individual Unsound themes from over the years. (This year's theme was Bubbles, a nod to Unsound's 20th anniversary, and, perhaps, to its delicate, ephemeral nature.)

This outfit was a shout-out to the 2013 theme, Interference. "Sequins," she said, "can glow so beautifully in different colours, owing to the fundamental nature of reality and matter: partial refraction of light on thin semi-permeability layers, and their mutual 'interference.'"

Kozakiewicz thought of the outfits as a "week-long letter of gratitude to the festival. It changed my life, which for many years was counted from Unsound to Unsound."

From attendees to artists to the festival's volunteers, many people feel a deep connection to the week-long annual gathering. It's not hard to see why. The program draws from the peripheries of modern music, in terms of both style and geography. Over its 20 years, Unsound has offered a prominent stage to local artists and scenes from around the world. The festival was an early supporter of Chicago footwork, South African gqom, and Tanzanian singeli music—microscenes whose principal artists played early international gigs at the festival. One of them is Jlin, the acclaimed footwork-adjacent producer from Indiana, whose Unsound debut was her first show outside North America, and only her third live performance ever.

"It's more than a festival," Jlin says. "You make friends for life, connections for life. A lot of people's careers started there. And you can just let loose, all the time. I always have anxieties about performances, but at Unsound, I can act like a complete ass. They understand me. The audience understands me. I'd never been a part of anything like that."

Unsound thoughtfully presents unconventional sounds from far beyond the mainstream in memorable settings, from movie theatres to opera houses to repurposed industrial spaces. Some of the pairings are truly inspired. In 2018, Lucrecia Dalt, a Colombian experimental artist whose music is inspired by geology, played hundreds of metres underground in a 13th-century salt mine, surrounded by exposed rock. Many performances are specially commissioned for the festival, often never to be performed again anywhere else. Hearing something unlike anything you've heard before is central to the Unsound experience.

"Unsound put me on the map," says Nazira, another DJ whose first international gig was the festival. Mat Schulz, who runs the week-long event with his partner Gosia Płysa, saw her play in 2016 while he was in Kazakhstan, scoping out locations for satellite festivals. Two months later he booked Nazira for Unsound. In 2017, he hired her to co-curate and help run Unsound Almaty.

"You have to understand," she said, "before that I didn't think I would ever play outside Almaty. It was such an emotional connection from the beginning, and I think that's the case for a lot of artists. They're not afraid to take risks. They put beginner artists on the map. Anyone would be happy to play there, but they invite an unknown DJ to Kazakhstan. That's what sets them apart."

The same goes for many artists from Poland and Eastern Europe. Karolina Oliwia Oleś, who DJs as Olivia, says her first gig at Unsound was one of the best experiences of her life. "I warmed up the stage before Underground Resistance, my biggest heroes," she said. Oleś has played and attended every Unsound since.

Another local, Martyna Maja, says a friend dragged her to one festival event at Hotel Forum during her early 20s when she was studying law. It was a "pivotal moment" when she understood she wanted to be part of this world and, shortly afterwards, dropped out to become a DJ. Today, we know her as VTSS. (She closed the main room on Friday night.) "Unsound, like no other place, has seen all my musical phases and faces," she said.

This year's edition highlighted artists from Ukraine, like the rapper Alyona Alyona, who, in addition to a main room set on Saturday night, sat for an interview at the conference in Ukrainian, with live translation for the audience.

A streak of loyalty runs through the staff as well, many of whom are volunteers. Olek Pawlus worked for years as Unsound's tech coordinator, a job that, he says, gave him some of the best moments of his life. Eventually he moved on, got a regular job, and attended the festival as a guest. He preferred working there.

"I was like, 'Ahh, give me something to do!'" he said. The satisfaction of helping to make Unsound happen was something he couldn't give up. This year, he took a week of vacation from his job to work at the festival for free.

"When you see that it's working," he said, "when the concert starts, the venue is filling up with people, you think 'OK, I'm part of something really cool, something really important.'"

Schulz says this is part of what makes running the festival worthwhile.

"There are people that come year after year," he said. "There's a community around the festival. We're part of this. It's not just us and then the community—everyone's connected. And people tell you, you know, that they started DJing, started making music because they came to Unsound. Or people say they started festivals because they came to Unsound." He laughed. "To them, I should apologise!"

Schulz founded Unsound almost by accident. He'd moved from Australia to Kraków in the '90s to write novels. He published two: Claim, a fictionalised account of the Tichborne affair, and Zombie Field, a dark story about three travellers from Schulz's home town, Wagga Wagga. Unsound, he said, was "a side thing."

"My friend and I decided to put on one event. There were no events like it in Poland, and not even so many in Europe. But it wasn't anything we thought we'd continue."

The first edition of Unsound, they were sure, would be the last. They had no idea what they were doing, lost all the money they put into it and, on the second night, got kicked out of their own venue.

"People from the club came onstage and threw us out because they hated the music," he said. "The next day, eight people bought tickets. So, not a very auspicious beginning."

That feeling continued for years. Schulz said he still feels weirdly "ambivalent" about Unsound. "It wasn't something I wanted to devote my life to." It was a distraction from his writing, which he saw as the main thing he was supposed to be doing. Even today, he feels guilty about not writing. ("The only thing I write now is the festival booklet.")

Ironically, that ambivalence was one of Unsound's strengths. Unconcerned with how many people turned up, or if the festival was able to continue at all, Schulz and his team took extraordinary risks, booking artists they didn't expect anyone to recognize—a suicidal curation policy in most situations. The result was something truly unique.

"If you really worry about what will happen, what people will think, you don't have as much freedom," Schulz said. "If you're really staking your identity on being the thing you're doing, you get more concerned and worried about how people will react to it. The fact that we were not so concerned with that was definitely a strength. We were willing to take risks, to do things differently, because the whole time we were thinking, 'Well, if it doesn't work, whatever, we'll go back to what we were doing before.'"

A caveat here is that Schulz, despite this so-called ambivalence, never took the festival lightly. Possessed by what his partner Płysa calls an "obsessive perfectionism," he's always sweated over every detail of every festival.

"There were many situations where I said, 'OK, just make the choice, don't ponder it for three weeks,'" Płysa said. "But he sits and polishes it until it's perfect."

Płysa, a woman whose warmth and playful humour belie her fierce industriousness, was one of Unsound's early attendees. "It was really eye-opening," she said. "I still remember Lucas Abela eating glass. I'd never seen anything like that." Płysa, who was studying journalism in Kraków at the time, approached Schulz in a bar. She said she wanted to make Unsound bigger, and she had ideas for how to do it.

"I was responsible for growing the structure," she said. "We set up our organisation as a non-profit, which we still do today. The city of Kraków was our main supporter, and they've been with us ever since."

Płysa helped develop a business model that relied more on state funding and, later, brand partnerships, than it did on ticket sales, which today account for only 35% of Unsound's revenue.

"At the core of Unsound is the need to stay truly independent," Płysa said. "That's not actually possible in the codependent world of capitalism, but I cherish the freedom of having public support, which allows us more artistic freedom in our programming. We don't aim to make a profit. It's not possible to do what we do without significant public funding."

Unsound grew in size and reach, taking over bigger venues, booking artists from farther abroad, and doing satellite events around the world, from Belarus and Ukraine to Australia, Canada and the US. Thanks to the daytime discourse program, the core events in Kraków became hotbeds of ideas and discussion as well as music. Meanwhile, the themes grew more daring, something best embodied by 2012's Surprise!, when half the lineup was never revealed. That one was Schulz's personal favourite.

"It played with your expectations as an audience member," he said. "People became far less concerned with who was playing when, especially in the club nights. We booked Polish artists in headliner slots. If people saw that, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to them on paper."

In 2012, Unsound held its first events at Hotel Forum, a disused Soviet-era hotel with striking brutalist architecture. This would become the beloved home of the festival's weekend club programming, a cosy, chandeliered fun-fair with up to four dance floors going all night, three nights in a row, every year—till 2021. Today, the chandeliers are gone. Upscale food stalls and a beer hall fill the spaces that were once Unsound's main dance floors. This, sadly, is just one of many ways Kraków's gentrification has hurt the festival.

"When we started there were so many raw spaces, unoccupied spaces," Schulz said. "Kraków was in a transition period economically. Lots of things had closed after the end of communism, there were lots of vacant spaces that were suitable for Unsound. Every year we'd drive around, find these spaces, put something on in them. Now they've all been developed into something else."

In a note at the beginning of this year's program booklet, Schulz and Płysa don't mince words: "These days it feels as if we're getting squeezed out," they write. "Developers, and development, are rampant." In addition to the Bubbles theme, this year's "mascot" was the Unsound Ectoplasm—"a bubbly form full of the energy of Unsound, built up over the years, which floats across the city, evicted from many of the places in which it was born, looking for places to settle."

Gentrification, combined with the plunging value of the Polish zloty and weaker streams of public funding, has made Unsound harder to produce than ever before. Fewer interesting venues are available to them now—no salt mine, no cosmetics factory, no disused warehouses, and, most tragically, no Hotel Forum. Overhead costs are rising, beginning with flights—a direct threat to the festival's mission to include artists from around the world. Unsound has always made itself as affordable as possible for its audience. This year, though, the opening and closing parties had a door price for the first time.

On the one hand, this is nothing new. Like all events with a DIY ethos, Unsound has always been somewhat precarious. In 2010, their theme was The End, a riff on their uncertainty about the festival's future. "Gosia described the festival as a rickety bus moving really fast down the road, trying to make sure nothing falls out," Schulz said. "I don't think that's visible from the outside, though."

Still, this is a particularly challenging time. Schulz and Płysa wonder what will happen next. Both muse aloud about moving the festival from autumn to summer, when outdoor venues would be available.

"We think a lot about what's going to happen after the 20th edition," Płysa said. "If our model is still valid, if our gentrified city is a place to do it anymore. It's a concerning time, for us and for everyone. That post-pandemic anxiety hasn't left us. We're 250 kilometres from a war zone. That changes the mindset, to put it lightly. It would almost feel inappropriate to celebrate when we have so much bad shit happening around us. But all the same, the festival is a place to celebrate, get out of that gloomy everyday reality. So we have to find a balance."

"I just hope we're not dancing on the Titanic," she added.

The final concert this year took place where it often does: Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego, a 19th century opera house on the edge of Kraków's old town. Opening the night were Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka, playing music from their new album Langouria, with otherworldly costumes and set design by the Ukrainian artist Planeta and lighting from Jacqueline Sobiszewski.

This was a performance very much born of Unsound. Birch, a Danish experimental artist, and Nowacka, a Polish vocalist, performed together for the first time last year at Ephemera, Unsound's sister festival in Warsaw. They teamed up again a few months later at Unsound Kraków, this time in a 19th-century synagogue. By then they had a real chemistry, and began working on their first album together, released this month by Unsound and the Polish label Mondoj.

This was an example, to paraphrase Schulz, of Unsound not just presenting "readymade work," but creating something new, pairing artists for the first time and presenting them in a unique setting that suits them perfectly. It was an utterly beautiful and surreal performance, theatrical in a way that lived up to the grandeur of the venue's balconies and baroque designs. For this attendee, it was the best thing all week.

"The programming here is an artistic act on its own," Płysa says. "It's creating artwork, the festival itself is artwork. That's something that drew me into the festival, before it became a bigger organisation. That same spirit is still there."

Schulz and Płysa onstage at Teatr im. Juliusza Słowackiego.