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Deep in a cavelike basement in the medieval old town of Krakow, Poland, the members of a Viennese band called Fuckhead basted their singer, stripped to his underwear, in soap and feathers. In the absence of a stage, they had set up their instruments in one corner of the room, on the same level as the audience; any line separating performer and spectator was purely notional. In that respect, it might have been any punk show of the past three decades. But this wasn’t a punk show, exactly.
On guitar, drums, and laptop, the quartet banged out a digitally damaged variant of heavy metal. But the music was secondary to their antics, which amounted to a kind of cryptic, symbolically fraught performance art, complete with a confounding array of props—like a cardboard box fitted over the drummer’s head and then broken open, yielding fistfuls of straw. One musician snaked through the crowd, delicately stuffing cotton balls in listeners’ ears. Toward the set’s climax, two band members stood facing opposite walls, shorts slipped down their hips—between them, a yard’s length of red string, its ends clenched between each man’s buttocks. The group ended the show teetering in a human pyramid, mostly naked but for their skivvies, tattoos, and yellow rubber gloves. It must have all meant something, but—what?
Back in 2007, this was my introduction to Unsound Festival, and if the performance wasn’t exactly typical for the event—that year I also saw techno DJs, ambient musicians, and a roundtable discussion about the underground art scene in Belarus, a Communist dictatorship—it wasn’t exactly atypical, either. I’ve eagerly returned almost every year since then, both as a spectator and a participant, conducting panel discussions and, on a few occasions, DJing the festival’s opening or closing parties. And I’ve learned that to attend Unsound is to be surprised, and sometimes flabbergasted: to discover not just new artists but entire strains of music; to have your understanding of the very nature of live music and club culture flipped on its ear. To come out, sometimes, spritzed in soap and feathers and strangers’ sweat. Whatever the term “festival” may conjure for you—H&M flower crowns and bindis on white people; fist-bumping bros in “Sex, Drugs, and Dubstep” T-shirts—Unsound inhabits an entirely separate discursive universe.
Where mainstream fests are sprawling, grueling affairs designed to appeal, it would seem, to people who love dirt and queues but hate music and personal dignity, Unsound is sophisticated, playful, and downright delightful. It’s also affordable: Last year’s all-access pass was just 310 zloty (roughly $78), and covered nine days of programming, some 25 concerts in all, in addition to a number of talks, screenings, and other events. For this year's festival, to be held October 16-23, ticket prices jumped to 385 zloty, or around $98.
Revelations at the Wieliczka Salt Mine during 2015's Unsound
Though it’s an urban festival, it’s walkable, with most of its events located between the picturesque historic city center, the elegantly dilapidated Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, and a handful of museums and ad hoc venues along the gentle curves of the River Vistula. And though Unsound stretches for an entire week, concerts are spread out, three or four per day, and rarely overlap—meaning that you can see everything you want and still have time to visit museums, peruse flea markets, and eat pierogi. Attendance for most events numbers several hundred; the weekend club nights spread a couple thousand people, tops, across multiple rooms.
That’s not just comfortable; it’s also conducive to fostering a kind of community that’s rare at any festival. Most patrons come for the whole week, so you see the same faces over and over, at shows and around town. During festival week, to set foot in Krakow’s Kuchnia u Doroty, a popular home-cooking spot famous for its “house specialty” (a tombstone-sized plate of potato pancakes slathered in beef goulash and sour cream) is to be confronted with a microcosm of Unsound’s public: a cheerful mixture of locals, Western Europeans, Brits, and a handful of Americans. And the fact that many artists stick around for the duration—and a growing number of them, like Tim Hecker, Dean Blunt, and Kode9, seem to come back almost every year—only adds to the familial intimacy. It might just be the most civilized music festival going.
Robert Rich's Sleep Concert during Unsound 2013
“Unsound favors exchange over transaction,” says Matt Werth of New York’s RVNG label, which has sent a number of its artists—including Holly Herndon, Julia Holter, and Maxmillion Dunbar—to perform there over the years. “Even when a stage elevates a performance at Unsound, physically or emotionally, the artist never feels removed from a shared experience. But it’s also not uncommon to find that artist standing next to you during the festival. Unsound creates a sense of community while consistently challenging and subverting festival conventions.”
Unsound’s founder is Mat Schulz, an Australian novelist who, like many Western bohemians, washed up in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and, unlike most of them, never left. Dismayed by the lack of festivals in Poland devoted to risk-taking music, especially with an electronic or experimental bent, Schulz and a fellow expat set out to fill that gap with a small underground event in 2003. The first edition, which lasted three days, proved to be an inauspicious beginning. “The second night, bouncers came onstage and stopped a concert, threw us out, and told us not to return,” Schulz recalls. “The last night had eight people in the audience. It was a trial by fire. But we persisted.”
Today, in addition to the Krakow flagship event held every October, Unsound encompasses regular activities in New York, Toronto, and Adelaide, Australia, as well as one-offs in places like Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and Batumi, Georgia. (Perhaps the fact that Unsound originated in a city on Europe’s so-called periphery is one of the things that has allowed it to continually tweak assumptions about the relationship between “center” and “margins.”)
Rrose at Unsound 2015
Schulz, 46, runs the organization alongside Gosia Płysa, a journalist and former law student whose involvement started as a festival volunteer in 2005, when she was just 20. They make a good pair. Płysa, who handles many of the fest’s logistical aspects, is a cool-headed navigator of Polish bureaucracy, while Schulz, who oversees programming, is wry, prone to self-doubt, and mischievous, with a secret delight in chaos. In 2015, a right-wing Polish blogger accused the festival of promoting Satanism. That set off a panicked clerical chain reaction that found Unsound suddenly unwelcome in several churches where it had long presented performances. Schulz didn’t exactly relish being targeted by the Polish extreme right, but you could tell he appreciated the absurdity of the situation.
In its early years, Unsound limited itself to a handful of events scattered across the city’s smaller nightclubs and basement venues, but as the festival has grown, it has woven itself even deeper into the fabric of the city. The spaces it utilizes are unique. There’s the aforementioned St. Catherine’s, where the ambient and neoclassical sounds of artists like Holter, Hecker (playing the church’s pipe organ, at that), and Stars of the Lid turned vaporous in the gothic structure’s high stone arches. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s a panoply of Communist-era architecture—like Kijów Centrum, a cinema that doubles as a time machine back to the height of the Space Age, and Nowa Huta, a working class suburb whose grim environs have lent added atmosphere to concerts from Sunn O))) and Swans. The crown jewel is undoubtedly the Hotel Forum, a Brutalist structure built in the 1970s along the River Vistula and long shuttered until Unsound successfully lobbied to put on events there in 2013. Today, its carpeted main hall serves as the centerpiece of the festival’s weekend club programming: With its low ceilings, blond wood detailing, and champagne-flute lighting overhead, it gives the impression of raving on a vintage cruise ship.
Sunn O))) during Unsound 2009
Unsound goes out of its way to tug attendees gently out of their everyday contexts. Even locals would have been surprised when, last year, the Chicago jazz cornetist Rob Mazurek climbed the steps of the main square’s bell tower and followed the resident bugler’s traditional hourly trumpet call with a minute of free improvisation. And Unsound’s organizers seem well aware that the experience of the festival may be even more important than the music itself. For a few years, they banned photography, in the effort to counteract social media’s steady pull at the edges of patrons’ attention. (Last year, they rescinded the photo ban, yet phones mostly stayed pocketed—suggesting that, miraculously, the attempt at behavioral therapy actually worked.) And in 2015, they took the unusual step of leaving a sizable portion of the lineup unannounced; attendees wouldn’t learn who some headliners were until the moment the artists took the stage.
That year, deep in an underground chamber carved out of rock, in a salt mine some 30 minutes outside Krakow, the audience was plunged into foggy near darkness and presented with melancholic bumps and rustles that sounded unmistakably like the work of Burial—an artist who, as far as anyone knows, has never, ever played live. It had to be his music; despite many imitators, no one else sounds quite like him. But was it actually the reclusive dubstep musician himself hiding under that hoodie onstage, or a proxy sent by his label? Or someone else entirely? You could feel the excitement in the room and, thanks to the surprisingly good cell phone coverage down there, by the time the set was over and we all breathed fresh air again, the news of what we’d heard below ground had already rippled across the internet. Rumors swirled for days afterward, but we never did find out the real story. In an era of instant access and the perpetual news feed, not knowing was far more rewarding than knowing ever could have been.