Unsound Festival 2025
Since 2003, each October, Kraków hosts Unsound Festival and briefly becomes the best place in the world to listen to music in. For attendees days take on a new rhythm: wake up around midday, rush to a performance in an anatomical theatre, weave past stag dos and over tram lines to attend panels and lectures in the main square, find obiad on the way to the evening gig, finishing up at the club. It’s a lot, but the music is so good that reserves of energy that you didn’t know existed open up.
Unsound thrives on partnerships. Gosia, Mat, and the team are great at working with artists, institutions, and brands that underpin the festival’s ambitious programming and ensure its survival. The music is uncompromising, stacked with bespoke commissions, rare appearances, and bold artist pairings. The experience is slick: BMW and Adidas sponsor the events, photographers roam around the venues, influencers turn up, the lot. I don’t love that part, but recognise it as a worthy set of trade-offs to enable a festival like this to survive, especially when ticket sales cover less than half of the costs. And then there’s Krakow: while no longer awash with spaces begging to throw a party in, it still makes for a great backdrop. It’s a beautiful, walkable city that’s just the right size to bump into festival people at various parts of the week.
The opening concert at Kino Kijów was a 6-hour screening of an experimental film River of Fundament, complete with a three-person live score. It was utterly wild, infinitely more enjoyable than it sounds, and a bold curtorial decision that set the scene for the week ahead. The film brings together separate performances filmed over the best part of a decade in New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles. It's loosely based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, and is scored and developed by Jonathan Bepler, who dove into the process the following day. My favourite part was the Detroit performance, where “25 tons of molten iron were poured from five custom-built furnaces into an open, molded pit formed in the earth at the site of a derelict steel mill along the Detroit River” (e-flux).
This year was also marked by a triumphant return to Hotel Forum, a sprawling, late modernist beast of a building that’s not welcomed Unsound since 2019. It hosted three nights this year, and just got listed as a protected building, a testament to the work Unsound did to show its value as a cultural venue. I started my nights in 89: a low-ceilinged, plush, red-carpeted basement room. On Friday, Joanne Robertson entranced everyone with her voice, a guitar, and heavy reverb (Imperial Gold ahhhhhh). On Saturday, a double billing of Olga Anna Markowska and Natan Kryszk took a cello and a zither and a saxophone to its minimalist, gorgeous conclusions.
Tracey won the highly-contested ‘most likely to become pop stars’ category, with an unbelievably fun set designed for low-attention spans and zero regard for genre coherence. These are all the highest compliments of course, and knocking Smerz off the top spot was not an easy feat but they are basically already pop stars. Bobby Bethoven was unreal, including a 30-minute run that included edits of Creep, Tirzah and Tones of Tail. Bewildering, fun, and so impressive that it got me to stay two hours longer than I was ready for. Both Krenz and the day after, 2K88 / Bianca Scout / Lauren Duffus / Rainy Miller, drew on threads between Polish and UK music with output shrouded in blinding fog, and unlike anything I’ve ever heard. Mohammad Adam built on this vibe with a late-night live set in 89. Taken together, these sets built on the mythology of taking a night bus in London which gave us Burial, or doing it on a cold rainy night in Stoke, and made walking through a blokowisko in Gdansk or Krakow’s cobbled streets on a grey day feel just as profound.
Discourse programme was great, if uneven. I saw great talks about music writing, copyright, memes (Kat Zavada, Aleksandra Herzyk and Kieran Press-Reynolds were amazing on this). A lot of the chatter was about the negative effect of streaming platforms on music. It got me to reflect on the ‘make something people want’ logic, how pervasive it is in all areas of life at this point, and how impossible it is to counter. People love how easy it is to stream music, I don’t think the wider effects of it are visible enough to impact behaviour, and it won’t be in the platform’s interests to do anything about it until it’s too late. Design’s Silicon Valley roots, and relentless focus on user experience, are complicit in this.
I grew up in Poland and left 13 years ago to live in the UK. Over that time, the narratives you hear about the two have seemingly swapped places: UK is endlessly declining, while Poland is a relentless growth machine. That statement's intentionally reductive and no doubt largely wrong, especially if you consider how unprogressive Poland remains on basic social issues we take for granted further west (Poland still doesn’t recognise same-sex marriage, for example). But it’s a powerful narrative, and clearly something’s going well. Poland may be booming, but it’s not exactly kind to cultural experimentation. That’s what makes Unsound’s endurance so striking: it survives through vision, execution, and a stubborn belief in the value of experimental art.