Unsound Festival Gets Loud

Surely not like this; sound artist Evicshen (Victoria Shen) is scraping her bleached frock of hair with a comb that’s hooked up to a contact mic and run through layers of distortion. Her actions create a wall of noise so sturdy, so fearsome that it rivals the soundings of her on stage collaborator, polish drummer Adam Golebiewski, who is thrashing and smashing in his own right.

The comb wasn't an anomaly; this performance also featured whips, french horns, motorized doodads and spectral sounding turn tables, all of which filled up the high halls of the Lincoln Center atrium in a wash of noise. Only in New York and only at Unsound, the Krakow-based, global music festival that has been organizing performances in New York City since 2010.

“As Unsound was getting bigger, we were always quite ambivalent, which I think is a good position to be in for programming because it means you can take risks,” says Mat Schulz, Unsound’s co-founder and artistic director. “Now, connecting experimental club music and different genres is more common, but [when we started in 2003], it was less so.”

That mission of connecting genres, artists and ideas was invoked in this year’s theme, “WEB,” which was relevant across the global iterations of the festival. “The WEB theme is underlining the connections we build between people, scenes, and communities. It was also a response to geopolitics,” says Gosia Płysa, Unsound’s co-director. “This traveling model of the festival leaves crumbs in different places, and can have a long-term effect—it's not just an ephemeral pop-up. It’s something that can lead to lasting mindset change.”

In New York City, those crumbs and connections look like unique, provocative cross-national collaborations. Such as Chicago footwork pioneer RP Boo’s deeply attuned performance with polish drummer Gary Gwadera. Or a night at Lincoln Center where NYC Downtown legend John Cale shares a bill with Ukrainian artists Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, whose Unsound-released album, гільдеґарда, deploys modular synths and centuries-old Ukrainian vocal practices to reflect on the country's ongoing wartime trauma.

Such moments of collaboration create new dialogues and spark real momentum that can serve as a counterforce to our paralyzed and alienated culture.

“Unsound has always had a cultural and educational mission. We care about bringing the community together and supporting artists early in their career,” Płysa shares.

Indeed, the festival has a long history of championing artists who go on to become major global acts. Unsound was the first European festival to book Arca and this year's festival in Krakow featured the likes of Norwegian alt pop songstresses Smerz, New York rapper Billy Woods and British DJ Djrum.

Unsound has also found that New York City provides fertile ground for their out of the box programming. "We've often found that [organizing performances] in New York is almost easier than in Krakow," Schulz shares. "People are very open and receptive. They're like, 'Okay, what's your idea?'"

The festival closed its busy stint in New York City at Brooklyn club Nowadays, for a long night of inventive sonics that was co-organized by the influential New Jersey electronic festival, Dripping. The evening opened with a sound installation by Jim O’Rourke and Eiko Ishibashi and was followed by a performance by composer, DJ and producer, Mica Levi, who deconstructed and re-built the very idea of a DJ set with their surprising mix. The night ended with a pounding, high-speed live set by Cry (Killbourne and Relaxer), before the one and only Leonce lit the floor up in a final blaze.

It’s hard to know what will come of all of these artists being brought together by Unsound's singular programming. But that's the point: the web has been laid. Now we watch it bend and grow.

Photography by Lawrence Sumulong