“Who is the kind of person that goes to Unsound Festival?” This recurring question kept floating every night my friends went out for the Kraków experimental music festival. Eagle-eyed New Yorkers can typically size a person up within seconds, immediately scanning over a crowd and slotting its members into subcultural niches by their appearance. It's the kind of practical discrimination that really only makes imagined sense, and then again only within a five borough radius. It’s one thing to joke about Poland being the “Greenpoint of Europe” and another to actually buy into it. But even with our antennas out, we were still coming up for a loss. There were high-stamina Berlin partiers mixed with polite, professorial types, artsy locals with constellations of piercings and more haggard ones outdrinking everyone. Amazonian dolls towered in high heels, a roving gentleman wore an “I Heart Femboys” shirt and one very memorable twink went to every show in an expensive-looking, floor-length leather duster straight out of The Matrix.
Trying to draw a through-line that made sense of this crowd was pointless because the eclecticism was its own answer. Many music festivals make a point of their own curation but with Unsound, the steady accumulation of fascinating things to see and hear was its own proof of concept. The festival has grown in odd ways since 2003, from being rudely shut down by bouncers in its first edition to a widely regarded series staged around the world. The theme of this years’ Unsound was “NOISE,” which felt so on the nose it was shocking to hear it had never been done before. In Mattin’s 2006 essay, “Theses on Noise,” introducing the festival’s announcement, the sound artist and writer laid out a number of tenants about noise and its relationship to capitalism and societyPoint I: “What the fuck is Noise? Precisely because of its indeterminacy noise is the most sensuous human activity / practice. To try to fix it or to make it a genre is as fucked up as believing in democracy.
Point VII: “It is more important to fuck the minds of the audience than to fuck your ears — and vice versa.”
The “indeterminacy” of noise is a broad brief for any festival, but in Unsound’s case it succeeded through the sheer number of ways it conspired to fuck with the audience’s minds. Daytime events, from label fairs to academic presentations, were bookended at night by sit-down concerts and pummeling club sets. “Genre” was important only as a point of departure, with artists using convention as a starting point to veer off into fascinating new directions.
International dance music was particularly well-represented. DJ Anderson do Paraíso, who’s known for his minimalist re-working of Brazilian funk, kept the genre’s signature ice-pick-to-the-brain treble while stripping away its floor of sledgehammer bass, playing a set that was as free-floating as it was punishing. Lisbon-based producer Nídia and Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti swapped the shifting drum machines of batida for live improvisation, with Magaletti pounding the hell out of her kit as Nídia MC’d and rained volleys of electronic effects over the beat. My personal favorite was Bolivian-American musician Chuquimamani-Condori, who came swaggering on stage in pristine ranchera whites and a keytar. Their record, DJ E is one of the best and most original releases in the past year, and they attacked the instrument like a rock star over a blend of twinkling Andean huayno and unstable electronics.
In other cases the theme was a permission slip to be as ear-splitting as humanly possible. Japanese noise music legend Keiji Haino did not disappoint, shredding on electric guitar with his whole body to create convulsive waves of sound before picking up a mic and layering blood-curdling wails into a sampler. Kenyan metal musician Lord Spikeheart strutted and preened around the stage, while letting out guttural roars over chugging guitars and blistering blast beats. Manchester club genius/weirdo aya held court on the decks, while shouting ribbons of stream-of-conscious poetry through gale force rave music. One of the funniest moments came courtesy of evilgiane and Evian Christ, who opened their set with an absolutely massive remix of the already-outsized banger “Every Time We Touch,” while the most surreal and visceral came courtesy of New York composer Ka Baird, who gesticulated around the venue like a silent film character while amplifying the buzzing, distorted sound of their own breath.
To visit Eastern Europe is to be reminded that you are no longer at the center of the universe, but on the periphery of one sphere of power and the bleeding edge of another. The border with Ukraine is an hour away from Kraków and the spill-over from the conflict has periodically brought the specter of World War Three into terrifying relief. Marco Fusinato’s performance of “DESASTRES was a reminder of this. Standing in front of a black-and-white movie screen, the artist synched his ferocious guitar-playing to trigger a supercut of images that ranged from eerily still forests to scenes of all-out state violence. The title is a reference to Francisco de Goya’s famous (and still shocking) series, Disasters of War, and the jaggedness of his sound paired with the starkness of the images suggested that the worst was lurking just out of frame. Leaving the theater and walking towards the old city center, aspects of Fusinato’s work were everywhere: strange insignia, faces carved in stone, pro-Ukrainian stickers, Christ on the cross, St. George’s dragon scaling the side of a building. When seeing Da Vinci’s masterpiece, Lady With an Ermine at the Czartoryski Museum, I could only think about the former palace it was housed in, and what the painting meant as a symbol: of the status and domination of a once-great, but now powerless royal family.
There were other great fusions of art and music and politics and noise throughout Unsound. The Irish group, Lankum, is known for turning the drone of traditional Irish folk music into a kind of world-weary post-rock, playing up uilleann pipes and concertina for all their ominous tone before launching into scorching full-band assaults. At one point they brought their subject matter thoroughly up to date, trading murder ballads and lovers’ laments for a declaration of solidarity with Palestinians. The time warp of these ancient instruments, which have soundtracked their own history of conflict, were brought powerfully to the present. In a similar vein, Iranian-Canadian duo Saint Abdullah and Irish producer Eomac staged their set so that they were cast to the side and the main point of focus was a film by the director, Rebecca Salvadori. Their piece, A Forbidden Distance, combined bass-heavy dance music against spliced together home movies that seemed to echo a story of a Middle Eastern family’s violent displacement and emigration. The effect was of a fragmentary portrait, of being distorted by circumstance but cohering again through sound.
Moments like these felt like the most immediate reminders of Mattin’s argument: that noise is mediated by power but made brilliantly and chaotically by people, and that a blistering appeal to a listener’s senses can do so much more than burst your eardrums — it can also completely fuck your mind.
Photos courtesy of Unsound Festival
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