Unsound is one of the world’s most innovative festivals of experimental music. This Polish festival focuses on a broad swath of contemporary music — emerging, experimental, and leftfield — whose sweep doesn’t follow typical genre constraints. Influential, it has developed a reputation for identifying innovative scenes and radical sounds.
Founded in 2003, Unsound wasn’t always the festival it is now. The first edition ended with artists thrown out of a club for playing music that was too weird for regular patrons. Now, with the main festival still happening every year at a number of venues across Kraków, regular events also take place in New York, Adelaide, Toronto, and London. Between 2016 and 2018, Unsound also produced eleven festivals in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus, part of a long history of working with curators and artists in the post-Soviet region.
Unsound Kraków 2024 takes place September 29 – October 6, and the schedule for music events is now up on the website and the Unsound app ( IOS / Android), along with tickets to individual events. It is important to highlight, that tickets are very limited for some events – they will sell out, so be quick. Unsound’s program also focuses on expansive daytime discourse programs, film screenings and smaller club events. Visitors can explore the historical center of Krakow through various venues. The program will take place in Łaźnia Nowa Theatre, Filharmonia Krakowska, Kino Kijów, The ICE Congress Centre Krakow and other venues.
In this article, our editor-in-chief Krištof Budke will showcase some of his program’s highlights.
Nídia
Nídia, formerly known as Nidia Minaj, is the Lisbon-based producer from cutting-edge record label Príncipe Discos (DJ Lycox, DJ Nigga Fox, Nuno Beats, DJ Narciso,…). The artist is still evolving as an artist and relentlessly innovating her own style of dance music with glorious positivity.
On her recent 3rd album she’s mixing all the emotions for the dancefloor. „Consistent with her fiery nature and mixed roots in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, „95 MINDJERES“ is framed by the decisive role of women freedom fighters in PAIGC’s struggle for the independence of Guinea-Bissau from Portuguese colonial domination during the 1960s and 1970s. Among others, the names of Teodora Gomes and Titina Silá shine brightly as leaders of a group of 95 women, providing them with military training and political awareness,“ writes Príncipe.
Lord Spikeheart
Dedicated to his iconic grandmother Muthoni wa Kirima, the only woman to earn the rank of Field Marshal during Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising against British colonists, Lord Spikeheart’s long-awaited solo debut The Adept is an album that seethes with revolutionary energy. He’s a unique vocalist and enigmatic storyteller who’s found his niche in the space between genres, freely mangling elements of death metal and grindcore with rap, mystical folkloric incantations and ear-splitting techno in his unrelenting search for peak sonic intensity. Screaming, growling and rhyming in Kikuyu, Kiswahili and English, he cuts an idiosyncratic shape into the cultural landscape, shining a spotlight on the African continent’s hardest, heaviest music.
His performance in Bike Jesus, Prague, was one of the most intense concerts I have ever seen.
Raphael Rogiński presents Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes feat. Amirtha Kidambi
Back in 2015, broad-minded guitarist, composer, performer, improviser and academic Raphael Rogiński set his sights on the jazz scene, interpreting works from legendary saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane, and adding his own compositions to texts from Langston Hughes, one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s this material Rogiński will draw from on this special Unsound Kraków 2024 performance, a modern deconstruction of the US civil rights movement’s sounds, words and expressions that’s rarely been more relevant.
bela, Theresa Baumgartner and Lukas Feigelfeld present Noise and Cries (굉음과 울음)
Berlin-based South Korean artist bela will present a special performance of their recently-released Subtext/Unsound album Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음 at this year’s Unsound Kraków, in collaboration with celebrated German installation artist Theresa Baumgartner and Austrian director and writer Lukas Feigelfeld. The album itself proposes a new form of South Korean expression, interlacing blood-curdling death metal growls with repurposed traditional rhythms and the heady, cybernetic maximalism of queer club music. It’s an album about death, but bela doesn’t use the theme to wallow in self pity, instead finding hope in the concept of rebirth.
➨ You can read more in our interview with bela
Baumgartner, best known for her work with artists such as Bendik Giske, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Marcel Weber, Jlin and ‚Stranger Things‘ composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, will bring her idiosyncratic touch to bela’s visceral live performance, infusing their typically spartan lighting with new energy. And Feigelfeld, who worked on Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, directed 2017’s psychedelic folk horror cult breakout Hagazussa, and crafted the chilling promo for bela’s „The Sage“, will provide additional visuals.
AKA HEX: Aïsha Devi and Slikback
AKA HEX is a brand new collaboration between Aïsha Devi and Slikback, whose debut show will feature guest appearances.
Devi has always used her music to look outward, beyond the confines of club music and the avant-garde towards a space that’s less predictable and far more mysterious. She was born in Switzerland with Nepali Indigenous heritage, and her transversal identity has helped her navigate the underground as not just a producer and vocalist, but as a DJ and curator. Co-founding the Danse Noire imprint in 2013, she used that platform to launch her breakout EP Hakken Dub / Throat Dub, following it up with the labyrinthine ‚Of Matter and Spirit‘ album in 2015. Devi’s interest in sonic alchemy and multi-dimensional expression was further developed on 2018’s ‚DNA Feelings‘, coming to an overflowing head with last year’s enigmatic ‚Death Is Home‘, which featured a collaboration with none other than Slikback.
Born and raised in Nairobi, Slikback is one of the world’s most adventurous producers, taking elements from the wide spectrum of club, noise, ambient and rap music and forming them into a psychedelic lattice of high-intensity sounds and emotions. He’s spent the last few years prolifically contributing to his canon via his Bandcamp stream, this year compiling the highlights into the frenetic double-LP ‚SLIKBACK‘ – 22 tracks of future-facing, soundsystem-ready experimental club sounds that define his journey so far.
Mica Levi & Sinfonietta Cracovia
Best known as one of the world’s most singular composers, having penned influential scores for films such as ‚Zone of Interest‘, ‚Under the Skin‘, ‚Jackie‘, ‚Zola‘ and ‚Monos‘, prolific London-based artist Mica Levi is impossible to pin down. They’re a member of CURL, Spresso, Tirzah and Good Sad Happy Bad, and their solo releases shift fluidly between blown-out shoegaze, noise and hypnotic sound collage. So it makes perfect sense that for this special Unsound Kraków performance, Levi is collaborating with Sinfonietta Cracovia, one of the leading chamber ensembles in Poland.
Famous for its interpretations of the works of Krzysztof Penderecki, the orchestra’s mentor and patron of many of its projects, Sinfonietta Cracovia has been active for three decades, collaborating with artists such as Ben Frost, Max Richter and Patrick Doyle, and working on projects for Netflix, TV ARTE and BBC Classical Music Television.
Evian Christ b2b evilgiane
British producer and DJ Evian Christ shot to notoriety in the early 2010s, when he released the Kings And Them mixtape, disrupting a forward-thinking collage of cloudy samples with skeletal, bass-heavy rhythms and deftly characterizing the era. Over ten years later, after working with Kanye West, Danny Brown, Travis Scott, Le1f and Tinashe, among others, he finally released his debut album proper, ‚Revanchist‘, returning to his roots and re-imagining vintage trance in vivid high definition. He’ll be appearing at Unsound Kraków 2024 alongside Surf Gang founder EvilGiane.
A well-known figure in Brooklyn’s constantly evolving local scene, EvilGiane is an in-demand producer, whose cutting-edge, genre agnostic style has found favour with artists such as PinkPantheress, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem. „I don’t make other people type beats,“ he told The Face, and he’s right – his tracks paint across genre lines, drawing from drill, footwork, trance and trap. And as a selector, he’s equally as open-minded, just as likely to throw in snippets of video game soundtracks or outsider cuts from Inga Copeland as he is blend low ‚n slow Southern rap trunk bumpers with off-kilter ambient oddities.
DJ Anderson Do Paraiso
Only 27 years old, DJ Anderson do Paraíso is at the forefront of the Funk BH (or Funk Mineiro) scene, offering a darker, more minimal answer to Brazil’s chaotic clatter of drums and MCs. Paraíso’s music simmers with tense, cinematic energy, muddling minimal, bumpy rhythms and nods to vintage hip-hop with classical, folk and jazz instrumentation and haunted samples. His debut album ‚Queridão‘, released earlier this year on Nyege Nyege Tapes, is one of the scene’s most idiosyncratic transmissions, a slowed-down, reverb-drenched collage of early dubstep low-end, high-pitched squeals and eerie, whisper-quiet vocals that’s as sensual as it is terrifying.
Kode9 presents History of Hyperdub DJ set
One of the UK music scene’s national treasures, Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) has been steering the underground for decades, as the figurehead of the legendary Hyperdub imprint and as a tireless DJ, producer, writer and promoter whose thirst for innovation and hybridization has helped set new benchmarks for bass music. His acclaimed four full-lengths (two of which were collaborations with late poet and MC The Spaceape) have nimbly traversed sonic wormholes, linking the space between jungle, footwork, UK garage, gqom and dubstep, and as a writer, he’s theorized about the „politics of frequency“ in 2010’s influential ‚Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear‘. More recently, his sound designs have been launched into the art world, presented as part of the Hyundai commission at the Tate Modern in 2018 and in the Barbican’s ‚AI: More Human than Human‘ show in 2019.
Safety Trance b2b Manuka Honey
Born and raised in Venezuela but currently based in Barcelona, Luis Garban kicked off his career in the early ’00s, curving fragmented breaks through rave’s vaporous remnants under the Cardopusher moniker. But since teaming up with Arca on her acclaimed ‚KiCk‚ series – notably co-producing the Rosalía collaboration ‚KLK‚ – he’s been additionally working as Safety Trance, putting his own futuristic spin on rowdy old-school reggaeton and splitting it with wild-eyed industrial and EBM elements. The hybridization is best witnessed on 2022’s Boysnoize-released ‚Noches de Terror‘, and his raft of collaborations with Isabella Lovestory, LSDXOXO, VTSS, Florentino and others.
With a run of acclaimed records like ‚Industrial Princess‘, Florentino collaboration ‚Machete‘ and the esoteric and sensual ‚3Eternities Beneath You‘ under her belt, Manuka Honey writhes on the edges of the dancefloor, rattling Latin-American and Caribbean rhythms through a skintight mesh of cathartic noise. Also a multi-disciplinary artist, a professional astrologer and a DJ, she brings a lavish, galaxy-brained energy to her mixes, playing „sexy, unpredictable and hard“ sounds from the furthest reaches of the world.
︵
✽ Follow Instagram and the official website of Unsound for more information ✽
Selection: Krištof Budke
Pridaj komentár