At Unsound Festival, the Weirder, the Better

KRAKOW, Poland — Last week, in the sun-bathed, historic city of Krakow, the streets were lined with posters for the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party, which looks set to make gains in local elections Sunday. Also unmissable were advertisements for “Clergy,” Wojciech Smarzowski’s excoriating film about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which has become a surprise domestic hit despite condemnation from members of the Law and Justice party and the church itself.

The sense of a divided city persisted elsewhere. Krakow is also home to Unsound, an annual festival of experimental and club music from across the globe, staged in dramatic venues across the city. It’s one of the world’s more unusual music festivals. And it is a roaring success — despite now being been banned from the city’s churches after a furor in 2015 in which a blog accused one of the festival’s acts of being a Satanist.

Unsound was founded in 2003 by Mat Schulz, an Australian writer living in Krakow, who was persuaded by his roommate to stage a small festival celebrating the sort of esoteric music they both loved. It expanded throughout Krakow, and now the weeklong October festival takes place in buildings ranging from a synagogue to a Baroque palace to Hotel Forum, a huge disused Soviet-era hotel, which hosts the club portion of the program.

Unsound also has several international offshoots, and stages festivals in London; Minsk, Belarus; Adelaide, Australia; and New York. Success in the United States (“the Polish dream,” according to the festival’s executive director, Gosia Plysa), impressed Polish authorities and attracted local government support. Weeklong passes for the Krakow festival now regularly sell out in under a minute, Schulz said.

One of the highlights of this year’s festival took place in the ornate Tempel Synagogue in Kazimierz, the city’s Jewish district. The concert combined a set of gorgeous, bucolic ambient music played by sound artist Lea Bertucci with a true oddity: a live performance of “Music and Poetry of the Kesh,” an album of electronic music by Todd Barton and the late science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

“Music and Poetry of the Kesh” was created by Barton and Le Guin as a soundtrack to be played while reading her 1985 novel “Always Coming Home.” For decades, it was only available as a cassette that came with the original hardback edition of the book. But in March, the obscure album was rereleased by New York record label Freedom to Spend, and it had its live premiere at Unsound. Barton played synthesizers and was joined by the Kesh Ensemble, a group of Polish musicians who sang and played percussion.

The performance was startlingly beautiful: a warm, slightly ramshackle night of poetry and song with a spiritual air. It built to the extraordinary “Heron Dance,” a hypnotic number with vague hints of Indonesian gamelan music that otherwise sounded completely unearthly.

Another standout concert took place 440 feet underground, in the concert hall of the Wieliczka Salt Mine, a major tourist attraction today that was the source of much of medieval Poland’s wealth. A set of soporific ambient sounds from Colombian artist Lucrecia Dalt had many audience members snoozing under the dim glow of the rock salt chandeliers. But the first ever performance in Poland by the great minimalist composer Terry Riley was livelier.Playing piano and occasionally singing, Riley’s performance ranged from Indian-influenced devotional music to a meandering electronic jam.

Toward the end of the concert, the audience thinned: People were heading for the surface and to the club at Hotel Forum, the main point of the festival for many. The night’s lineup was stupendously eclectic. But whether Berlin-based producer Lotic’s avant-garde electro ballads, Adam Golebiewskie’s brutal solo drumming demonstration or Spanish DJ JASSS’ rumbling audiovisual show were great in their own right was somewhat beside the point. It was the texture of the three run together, in this hulk of a building, that felt special, and exciting.

There was surely no better example of Unsound’s dedication to the eclectic than “Clickbait,” a performance that took in ICE Krakow, a plush conference center. Audint, a British multimedia group, presented a paranoid short film that speculated on claims that diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Havana had been subjected to attacks by sonic weapons. (Cuba says there is no proof of this.) The movie was soundtracked by rumbling bass notes. Next, in a queasy collaboration between musician Rabit, visual artist Sam Rolfes and Texan performance artists House of Kenzo, a live image of a dancer was manipulated on a big screen so that it looked like a hideous skeletal beast, and three other dancers moved provocatively through the crowd.

Schulz said the appeal of Unsound rests in seeing something you’ve never seen before. It certainly offers that. Indeed, many shows were commissioned for the festival. There is something undeniably exhilarating about it all in total, a sense of adventure, discovery and gleeful boundary-testing.

And much of it is transgressive, too: discomforting, or political, or nakedly sexual. It feels radically at odds with the traditional values espoused by Law and Justice, or the picturesque old town that most tourists experience. And indeed, the festival has already clashed with the church, though Schulz said he was hopeful the ban would be reversed in future.

Schulz acknowledged there was a danger that Unsound could be seen as some sort of alternative bubble, largely populated by an international audience. But he said a number of efforts had been made to reach out to Krakow residents, most notably by reserving tickets at the door for locals to the club nights in Hotel Forum.

Still, Unsound seems like a strange fit with Krakow. “But that’s a reason to keep doing it here,” Schulz said.