- Unsound pulls off an impressive balancing act. It challenges its audience at every turn, presenting them with artists that are unfamiliar and not easily understood. And yet, it creates an atmosphere that's warm, upbeat and even down to earth. More than just a place to hear amazing music, for many it's an annual ritual, a chance to meet old friends and make new ones in one of Europe's most beautiful cities: Kraków. Taking place in cinemas, factories, orchestral concert halls and hotel function rooms, it's equal parts seated performances and all-night parties, cultural enrichment and boozy romp.
More than any festival I've been to, Unsound prizes the element of discovery. It's extremely rare that so many styles from around the world are presented in the same place at the same time. Artists and attendees alike find the tapestry of their tastes expanded by the adventurous program. If you're lucky, you might even see this playing out before your eyes. Take, for instance, gqom pioneer DJ Lag. During a live Exchange with RA editor Ryan Keeling, an audience member argued that footwork changed as a result of the Teklife crew's gigs around the world, and wondered if the same would happen for gqom. DJ Lag, then two days into his first trip outside South Africa, admitted he didn't know much about the other acts on the bill. That night, though, he was front and center for DJ Earl, dancing with sweaty abandon. In this sense, Unsound doesn't just present modern music; it helps it evolve. More than just a well-curated festival, it's a frothing petri dish of colliding ideas and cross-pollination, one that, however immeasurably, helps push music forward.
Senyawa
Central to Unsound's appeal is its knack for sourcing singular acts from distant corners of the world. For me, no one embodied that better than Senyawa. Opening for Death Grips at Teatr Łaźnia Nowa, a "post-industrial space" in "an enormous communist-era suburb," the Javanese duo unleashed something far more visceral and spellbinding than their records would lead you to expect (this short film from Vincent Moon captures them nicely). On the left, Wukir Suryadi used an instrument he made from bamboo and agricultural tools (the "bambuwukir") to produce a startling range of sounds: plucked strings, strummed melodies, percussive chugs and, when bowed like a cello, sonorous groans. On the right, Rully Shabara conjured even stranger sounds from a more traditional instrument: his voice. In turns beautiful and terrifying, he explored the wildest extremes of vocal performance, growling, squeaking and ululating, mixing non-verbal sounds with lyrics in various Indonesian languages—Sulawesian, Javanese, Bahasa Indonesia.
Onstage, Senyawa could be mistaken for a metal band: both clad in black, Suryadi stoically shaking his long black hair as he worked his instrument, Shabara grimacing and strutting around as if gearing up for a boxing match. The performance's most striking moment, though, was a delicate one. Stepping beyond his two microphones, cooing with the pained expression of an opera singer, Shabara let his voice float unassisted into the cavernous room, revealing a streak of vulnerability within the duo's awesome violence.
Helm, Moa Pillar and Embassy For The Displaced
The theme for this year's festival was "Dislocation," an open-ended concept the program summed up as "the long and provocative tension between 'centre' and 'periphery' that often fuels cultural development." The clearest example of this that I saw was at ICE on Saturday evening, where the program began with two films by the design collective Embassy For The Displaced, soundtracked by the UK artist Helm. First came a dreamlike sequence of images from the Greek island of Lesvos, perhaps the most turbulent pinch point of Europe's refugee crisis. The Russian artist Moa Pillar (who took it upon himself to document his own journey to Unsound) joined Helm for the main event: a longer film called "Inner Space: Siberia," which explored Novosibirsk and the Altai Mountains in the northeastern corner of Russia. Spread across two levels in the modern and elegant theater, the crowd zoned out to long waves of humming drone, while the images flitted between closeups of tree trunks and wide shots of forbidding mountaintops, eventually moving outward to capture the drab villages of Novosibirsk and its people. The music was like the images—soothing and unsettling, ominous and sublime, desolate and rich. As it rolled over me, I found myself reflecting on the difference in circumstances between the people in that room and the people on the screen—meditating, in other words, on the theme of dislocation. The performance had done its job.
Errorsmith
At Hotel Forum, where the party ends sometime past 6 AM, Unsound is faced with an interesting mission: keep the crowds dancing without reverting to standard club fare. Few artists did this better than Errorsmith. Real name Erik Wiegand, Errorsmith is a German producer who's released music in fits and starts since 1996, mostly in collaborations: Smith N Hack with Soundstream, MMM with Fiedel, and with Mark Fell, the coproducer of last year's excellent Protogravity EP. Even those who follow Wiegand's music might not be sure of his sound as a solo artist, but few would have been surprised by what he delivered last Saturday night. The thick, punchy, angular grooves were brutally economic in a way typical of Hard Wax affiliates, but with a rambunctious sense of fun that felt more 50Weapons (who released his most recent solo production, "Airbag"). Weaving between chaos and tidy dance grooves, leaping through odd mutations of techno, dancehall and bass music with the switch of a single drum pattern, he had a crowd thrashing about beneath Hotel Forum's flickering chandeliers. When he finished, something funny happened: the crowd demanded an encore, and he gave one, something I've never seen outside of a rock concert.
Veronica Vasicka
As we pored over the program early in the festival, a friend told me that, after so many surprising sounds, straight dance music can fall a little flat at Unsound. This made the programming at the festival's closing party particularly deft. Fittingly titled Evacuation Slide, the event was basically a warehouse rave (impressively, it was free to all, pass-holders and non-pass-holders alike), but it eased in the club vibe slowly, with Philip Sherburne followed by Edward, Veronica Vasicka, Dr Rubinstein and the Polish duo Marco Y Luca. Vasicka in particular hit the mood perfectly, underpinning the dark synth pop sound of her Minimal Wave label with thumping techno beats (I could have sworn I heard the propulsive intro to Gesloten Cirkel's "Submit X," though the rest of the track never materialized). Early in the set, she teased in elements of Kraftwerk's "Numbers," which, as a multilingual avant-garde club anthem, struck me as quintessentially Unsound. Soon after that came something I assumed was an old darkwave gem, which had me musing on the problem of playing old music at such a future-facing festival, until I was proven wrong: "It's 2016," the track's vocalist smugly asserted. Shazam told me this was Marie Davidson's "Naive To The Bone" off Adieux Au Dancefloor, an album less than a month old.
DJ Earl
In 2011, DJ Rashad "easily destroyed" a dance floor at Unsound. Last Thursday, DJ Earl did much the same. While his hypemen repeatedly shouted out footwork's late pioneer—"Put your hands up for Rashad! Put your hands up for Rashad!"—Earl blasted through one frenetic weapon after another, charting an impressively broad musical taste in the process. Along with reams of Teklife originals, there were remixes of Drake's "Hotline Bling," Boddika & Joy Orbison's "Swims," Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," Julio Bashmore's "Battle For Middle You"—it seemed just about anything could be thrown into the footwork blender and come out the other end a searing 160 BPM banger. While the man himself stood near-motionless with a towel over his head (no headphones in sight), Teklife dancers Sirr Tmo and Dre showed off the frantic moves this music was made to soundtrack. The crowd, rather than trying to keep up, jiggled madly and surged back and forth, at times as if on the brink of a mosh pit. "Chicago footwork at its finest!!" the MC barked. While I wondered how this scene compared to their parties back home, in that moment it was easy to believe.
Photo credits /
Camille Blake - DJ Earl
Theresa Baumgartner - Errorsmith, Senyawa
Anna Spysz - Veronica Vasicka, Helm and Moa Pillar
Helm, Moa Pillar and Embassy For The Displaced The theme for this year's festival was "Dislocation," an open-ended concept the program summed up as "the long and provocative tension between 'centre' and 'periphery' that often fuels cultural development." The clearest example of this that I saw was at ICE on Saturday evening, where the program began with two films by the design collective Embassy For The Displaced, soundtracked by the UK artist Helm. First came a dreamlike sequence of images from the Greek island of Lesvos, perhaps the most turbulent pinch point of Europe's refugee crisis. The Russian artist Moa Pillar (who took it upon himself to document his own journey to Unsound) joined Helm for the main event: a longer film called "Inner Space: Siberia," which explored Novosibirsk and the Altai Mountains in the northeastern corner of Russia. Spread across two levels in the modern and elegant theater, the crowd zoned out to long waves of humming drone, while the images flitted between closeups of tree trunks and wide shots of forbidding mountaintops, eventually moving outward to capture the drab villages of Novosibirsk and its people. The music was like the images—soothing and unsettling, ominous and sublime, desolate and rich. As it rolled over me, I found myself reflecting on the difference in circumstances between the people in that room and the people on the screen—meditating, in other words, on the theme of dislocation. The performance had done its job.
Errorsmith At Hotel Forum, where the party ends sometime past 6 AM, Unsound is faced with an interesting mission: keep the crowds dancing without reverting to standard club fare. Few artists did this better than Errorsmith. Real name Erik Wiegand, Errorsmith is a German producer who's released music in fits and starts since 1996, mostly in collaborations: Smith N Hack with Soundstream, MMM with Fiedel, and with Mark Fell, the coproducer of last year's excellent Protogravity EP. Even those who follow Wiegand's music might not be sure of his sound as a solo artist, but few would have been surprised by what he delivered last Saturday night. The thick, punchy, angular grooves were brutally economic in a way typical of Hard Wax affiliates, but with a rambunctious sense of fun that felt more 50Weapons (who released his most recent solo production, "Airbag"). Weaving between chaos and tidy dance grooves, leaping through odd mutations of techno, dancehall and bass music with the switch of a single drum pattern, he had a crowd thrashing about beneath Hotel Forum's flickering chandeliers. When he finished, something funny happened: the crowd demanded an encore, and he gave one, something I've never seen outside of a rock concert.
Veronica Vasicka As we pored over the program early in the festival, a friend told me that, after so many surprising sounds, straight dance music can fall a little flat at Unsound. This made the programming at the festival's closing party particularly deft. Fittingly titled Evacuation Slide, the event was basically a warehouse rave (impressively, it was free to all, pass-holders and non-pass-holders alike), but it eased in the club vibe slowly, with Philip Sherburne followed by Edward, Veronica Vasicka, Dr Rubinstein and the Polish duo Marco Y Luca. Vasicka in particular hit the mood perfectly, underpinning the dark synth pop sound of her Minimal Wave label with thumping techno beats (I could have sworn I heard the propulsive intro to Gesloten Cirkel's "Submit X," though the rest of the track never materialized). Early in the set, she teased in elements of Kraftwerk's "Numbers," which, as a multilingual avant-garde club anthem, struck me as quintessentially Unsound. Soon after that came something I assumed was an old darkwave gem, which had me musing on the problem of playing old music at such a future-facing festival, until I was proven wrong: "It's 2016," the track's vocalist smugly asserted. Shazam told me this was Marie Davidson's "Naive To The Bone" off Adieux Au Dancefloor, an album less than a month old.
DJ Earl In 2011, DJ Rashad "easily destroyed" a dance floor at Unsound. Last Thursday, DJ Earl did much the same. While his hypemen repeatedly shouted out footwork's late pioneer—"Put your hands up for Rashad! Put your hands up for Rashad!"—Earl blasted through one frenetic weapon after another, charting an impressively broad musical taste in the process. Along with reams of Teklife originals, there were remixes of Drake's "Hotline Bling," Boddika & Joy Orbison's "Swims," Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," Julio Bashmore's "Battle For Middle You"—it seemed just about anything could be thrown into the footwork blender and come out the other end a searing 160 BPM banger. While the man himself stood near-motionless with a towel over his head (no headphones in sight), Teklife dancers Sirr Tmo and Dre showed off the frantic moves this music was made to soundtrack. The crowd, rather than trying to keep up, jiggled madly and surged back and forth, at times as if on the brink of a mosh pit. "Chicago footwork at its finest!!" the MC barked. While I wondered how this scene compared to their parties back home, in that moment it was easy to believe. Photo credits / Camille Blake - DJ Earl Theresa Baumgartner - Errorsmith, Senyawa Anna Spysz - Veronica Vasicka, Helm and Moa Pillar