Unsound is a 7-day festival in Krakow where you can check out everything that is currently hot and hip in (mainly) electronic music.

The festival is pretty much a shining example of what a festival should be in the year 2015:

• You can see the most interesting artists at work there;
• There are daily panel discussions, artist talks and readings held;
• There are workshops, yoga sessions (Laraaji) and listening sessions organised;
• There is a radio station that broadcasts Unsound sessions daily, for the entire week;
• The festival sets up new ‘commissioned projects’ whereby artists enter into unusual collaborations. That was how Powell was confronted with Lorenzo Senni, and there was ‘Gregidency’ – whereby Greg Fox (drummer of Liturgy) played with 5 artists that neither he nor the audience knew the identity of in advance;
• There is an expo by the festival’s own graphic designer.

On top of all that, there is the fact that the concerts all take place in unusual locations around the city. In a salt mine 135 meters under the ground, an old factory, a historic student club, the new congress centre ICE, the museum for Japanese art, an old tram depot, the Tempel Synagogue, …

What made this edition of Unsound even more unique was the theme: Surprise. More than half of the artists performing were unknown prior to appearing on stage.

Aside from the ‘regular’ concerts, there were also morning concerts on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. As of Thursday evening, for 4 nights in a row, there were even concerts or parties in Hotel Forum (a hotel that envelopes itself in the Eastern Block style of the ‘70s).

More than 100 artists played at Unsound this year, but below you will find a summary of those that most surprised us, put a lump in our throat, got us dancing or gave us goosebumps.

America’s Bill Orcutt played the stars from the heavens with his improvisation blues on a 4-snare acoustic guitar in Rotunda. After him, first Fis and then Helm (with dancer) both presented very dark, fascinating electronica sets.

Allessandro Cortini, the man who steers the synths for Nine Inch Nails, had an entire venue at this feet. He gave an impressive concert full of analogue synth arpeggio’s, doused in a sauce of delays and reverbs.

Then Liturgy played a very solid, Black Metal based Jazz Metal set that was full of exciting hooks and rhythms. Performance artist Lucas Abela already left everyone bewildered after 15 minutes: with his mouth, he played a 50cm long shard of glass that - by means of contact microphones and a few effect pedals- emitted the most bizarre sounds.

Australian composer Lawrence English then had everyone diving for their earplugs with his heavy noise set. Later that week, English also gave a 2-day workshop in ‘field recording’, whereby the city of Krakow was recorded on a sound card. The enigmatic electronica-artist Rrose kept an entire venue as quiet as a mouse, for an entire hour, at 11am in the morning…  with the wonderful composition "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion" involving James Tenney on gong. Elysia Crampton presented a surprising yet warm set, with a mix of (what looked like) video game sounds and keyboard melodies. An assault on ears and eyes, but one of the highlights of the festival, was then the hard noise performance by Danish duo Damien Dubrovnic.

With a very solid set containing new and old work, Yves De Mey got his audience dancing every now and then… not always so simple, what with the broken beats that he conjured out of his instruments. Dominique Fernow may lay claim to having played the most intense concert of the festival, with his noise project Prurient. Hospital Productions’ label boss more or less entirely lost control and stood there playing the entire set with an unseen fury and intensity.

On Thursday evening, DJ Richard was the one to warm up the audience in the large ballroom of the Wieliczka Salt Mine. While the 1500 present were lowered 135m deep into the mine via a tiny lift, he played an apocalyptic set full of dark drones and hard noise. Beats and samples blared through the speakers from the moment that the lights were dimmed – beats that could only be by Burial, although we will never know if he himself was behind the dials. In any event, it all certainly sounded great down there, deep under the fields of Krakow. After a pretty short set by Burial, King Midas Sound & Fennesz presented a very dark but very beautiful concert. ‘Edition 1’, the just recently released album, was clearly the focus. 

This year there was also a live version of Ephemera, the multi-sensory project (light, sound, aroma) that the festival developed last year. Tim Hecker played a live set in an old factory shrouded in a thick layer of smoke, that was manipulated by aroma-artist Geza Schoen. When light designer M.F.O from Berlin then lit up that smoke, we could definitely speak of a unique, 40 minute experience.

During the evenings and nights that were more focused upon dance, we especially enjoyed Amnesia Scanner, Holly Herndon (with Colin Self on vocals), Shackleton & Nisennenmondai and Nozinja.

Due to the extent of what was on offer, the full calendar and the difficult choices that sometimes had to be made, we unfortunately had to miss seeing various artists. Going by the reactions we heard afterwards, the sets of Visionist, Rabit, RP Boo, Kode9, Andy Stott, Aurora Halal and Optimo were very much worth seeing.

You can find all the artists who played at Unsound here.