Unsound Festival

The tradition & historical record

Unsound Festival, also known as Unsound, is an annual music festival that takes place in Kraków, Poland, dealing with evolving and mutating forms of music, as well as related visual arts. Apart from the main festival, Unsound regularly takes place in cities around the world such as New York, London, Adelaide, Toronto, Minsk, and Tbilisi. The Kraków festival is run by the non-profit organisation Fundacja Tone Muzyka i Nowe Formy Sztuki (Tone Foundation for Music and New Forms of Art). ¹

The first Unsound festival in Kraków, Poland took place in 2003, starting out as a local, underground event in the city's cellar bars. It currently falls in the first part of October and lasts around one week. Starting out as an event focused on Polish audiences, in recent years it has rapidly developed to become one of the most prominent events of its kind in Europe. In 2010, the festival developed its program and visual identity around the theme "Horror, the pleasure of fear and unease", which explored the history and emerging trend of darkness in music. "Horror" was followed up in 2011 with the theme "Future Shock," inspired by the 1970 book by futurist Alvin Toffler. Subsequent themes have included "The End" (2012), "Interference" (2013) and "The Dream" (2014). The theme for 2015 was "Surprise", described in a press release that was heavily redacted and intentionally revealed little. Following were the themes "Dislocation","Flower Power", "Presence" and "Solidarity". ¹

Unsound is also known for opening up architectural spaces, adapting them for music events. In Kraków, this includes Hotel Forum, a communist-era hotel building that had lain empty for a decade until Unsound 2012, then subsequently became an important cultural hub in the city. In Toronto in June 2015, Unsound adapted the abandoned Hearn Power Station to produce the first ever public event in the space in collaboration with Luminato Festival. Unsound is a founding and active member of ICAS (International Cities of Advanced Sound). ¹

The co-founder and artistic director of Unsound is Mat Schulz. The executive director is Małgorzata Płysa. ¹

In February 2010, Unsound cooperated with local partners in New York such as the Wordless Music series, Bunker and Electronic Music Foundation to create a 10-day satellite event involving music, film, workshops and panel discussions. There have been events in London, partnering with The Barbican and BFI among others; and Unsound Toronto as part of Luminato. Unsound has also worked in the region of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and The Caucasus, to create mini-festivals with local partners and curators. This includes the Unsound Dislocation project, which took place in 11 cities across the post-Soviet region in 2016–17. ¹

Several events have been staged in Adelaide, South Australia, within the framework of the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 2013 and 2016. It again held the event over two nights in Adelaide in July 2022 as part of Illuminate Adelaide, in the Dom Polski Centre (a.k.a. the Polish Club) in Angas Street. In 2023, the event expanded to three nights, with the final one being held in the new Hindley Street Music Hall, featuring Oneohtrix Point Never supported by CORIN (Corin Ileto, Filipina-Australian electronic producer, composer, and performer). This event celebrated Unsound Adelaide's 10th anniversary. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Unsound Festival”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Unsound Festival is yearly music festival in Poland, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 4 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²