If you’re the kind of festival-goer who likes to have a laminated spreadsheet of who to see and when, this year’s Unsound would have made your teeth itch. The theme for the Kraków-based festival was “surprise”: about half the artists were kept a secret until they went on stage, forcing its attendees to succumb to serendipity and even disappointment.
The theme this year was a much more lighthearted interrogation of how and why we talk about festivals, compared to 2013’s Unsound, which banned audiences from taking photos, in a Canute-like denunciation of the Instagram age.The theme for 2015’s event simply forces you to approach artists without baggage – and the experience of seeing something without knowing what it is, without being able to bone up on it beforehand, is very freeing. The only problem is that in a city as beautiful as Kraków, and a festival full of fascinating people, you could all too easily not take the gamble, and merely miss out on the artists in favour of pushing pierogi into your face.
Of the surprises, the least well-kept was Richie Hawtin, the rumour mill churning long before his set. Being secret is a very Hawtin move – he likes to set himself apart from his name-in-lights peers in Ibiza – though there were still pompous moments, such as the overlong ambient intro. But this is Hawtin, and his techno is handsomely rendered, even if a little retrograde compared to, say, Lexxi and Endgame’s vivid evocation of the splintering madness of digital culture.
The best-kept secret involved Burial: 125m below the ground in a chandelier-decked ballroom at the heart of a salt mine – a stunning coup of a venue – his unmistakable haunted garage crackle rustled from the speakers, with no one on stage. Was this Burial’s first ever live set? Well, no, as his label head Kode9 later confirmed, but it was a nice gossipy diversion – and a very appropriate setting to hear the tracks, including some new (to me) material. The real star of the salt mine though was King Midas Sound, playing with Christian Fennesz, with whom they’ve made an excellent new album. This was yin and yang in harmony, Kevin Martin’s hawkish tendency to push everything into dub apocalypse tempered by Fennesz – the sight of him strumming his guitar with no discernible rhythm coming out was weirdly horrifying. And crucially, the pair have drawn out the best songwriting yet from Roger Robinson and Kiki Hitomi.
Their brand of music – rooted in hedonism, but haunted by anxiety – has long been a central focus for Unsound’s curators, and there was plenty more where that came from. On Saturday night in Hotel Forum, the exquisite Soviet-era hotel that becomes a three-room club space, was swamped in different grades of gloom: Visionist’s emo introspection, Rabit and Kuedo’s arms race, Andy Stott’s straightforward industrial churn, each of them lacking in dialogue with the audience. Bookending them though were two jewels. US juke innovator Jlin slayed with her debut live performance, while Untold, lit by a gorgeous peach strobe, remains one of the most impressive musicians working in the UK today.
The night’s harsh aesthetic had already started in the Rotunda venue, where Kiwi producer Fis and blues guitarist Bill Orcutt both made mindblowing work with bursts of noise, though one with an infinity of laptop power, the other just with four strings.
Friday night conversely was boisterous fun, with tempos regularly nosing above 150bpm. South African Shangaan producer Nozinja remains of the greatest live acts in the world, a gigantic egotist who regularly stops the music to have the crowd chant his name, and who basically just hits play on his breakneck productions – leaving more focus for the wild song and dance of his band, who defy osteopathy and contort their lower backs into strutting poses. Equally fast was RP Boo, firing off footwork anthems that are both totally experimental and totally crowd-pleasing – his affection for the festival, where he played a moving debut European gig in 2013, shone from his face. Shackleton was back on form after his fussy Powerplanet project, playing with Japanese band Nisennenmondai. Seeing Kode9 in Poland is perhaps like having a full English on the Costa del Sol, but his set was the best I’ve seen from him: a riot of UK funky trap and global bass, all peppered with bits of JME and D Double E. And where in London can you be handed a slice of freshly baked plum cake on the dancefloor?
Outside the club performances, I missed drummer Greg Fox’s return to metal band Liturgy, but did catch his “Gregidency”, a series of surprise improvised performances in a deserted cigarette factory, with people he mostly had never met before. His playing is a deeply invigorating blend of free-jazz flurries and metal rolls – paired with bass clarinetist Jerzy Mazzoll he was lyrical and supportive, but with Oren Ambarchi they wound each other into ever-greater trauma.
A big disappointment though was Current 93, who arrived in a cloud of controversy, having been banned from playing a Kraków church after accusations of Satanism. Well, if they’ve sold their souls to the devil, they better have kept the receipts, as this was a maddeningly milquetoast performance. David Tibet’s live setup mostly sounded like a wedding covers band who had their memories wiped just before going on stage. Health were also bad, but in a fascinating way. Tracks like USA Boys and Perfect Skin were urgent and brilliant, but their latest material storms into the stadium with all of the necessary hair and production to fill it, but none of the tunes. The void at the heart of these songs is absolute, even beautifully so.
Bad performances are the inevitable price for a festival that takes risks. People defied hangovers for daytime talks about Polish journalism or gender in dance culture. Warsaw club night Brutaz did a speed-dating session. Laraaji did yoga lessons. Colin Self vogued violently on the speakers during his performance with Holly Herndon. Sean Paul, Rihanna and hard house all got blasted on dancefloors. Surprises may have been explicitly written into the bill, but the unexpected is at the heart of this festival, which remains Europe’s best – one that takes the temperature of the underground as well as giving it a shot in the arm.
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