If, per Theresa May, being a citizen of the world is being a citizen of nowhere, what does that mean for music, which is more globally interconnected than ever? Artists collaborate via email, rack up the air miles, and can be heavily influenced by a tiny scene on the other side of the world. At the same time, you can never rip up your roots entirely. The 14th edition of Unsound festival washes these conundrums down with gallons of of bison grass vodka.
The Kraków event follows recent spinoff festivals in Russia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, with the organisers setting up collaborations between European musicians and locals, some of whom are in tow here. The overarching theme is Dislocation, whether it’s artists “dislocated” from their homes and scenes, or – come Monday morning, after four days and nights of cutting-edge electronics – punters dislocated from the very fabric of reality.
One of the most brilliantly dislocated performances comes from PC Music crew member Felicita, commissioned to collaborate with the traditional Polish dance company Śląsk. Folk dances, involving lots of twirling around and dramatised romance, are paired with plangent piano melodies, scorched ambient noise and, most incongruously, wild synthetic pop. Despite (or rather because of) the aesthetic clashes, it hangs together in a supremely atmospheric whole. Devised in the wake of Brexit, it’s a stirring affirmation of how cultures can coexist while retaining their own voices. They’re followed by an equally impressive collaboration between Amnesia Scanner and Pan label head Bill Kouligas, where giant projected images morph over electronic noise of overwhelming intensity, building to a strident rave climax. The apparently random images – of wading birds, or lads in Less Than Jake T-shirts – become terrifying in their dislocated meaninglessness.
Another good commission is that of British producer Helm, working with Greek visual artists Embassy for the Displaced and Moscow producer Moa Pillar. Backed with footage of Siberia, their quivering electronics begin with a soft alarm sound that ebbs away as they head deeper into the almost monochrome wilderness. Their awe at nature is moving, but later footage, shot in a Siberian city, awkwardly exoticises its people – perhaps intentionally underlining the fact that it takes more than a visit to understand a culture.
Unsound also brings together Kraków’s Sinfonietta Cracovia and a supergroup of bleak Scandinavian talent from the Northern Electronics and Posh Isolation labels. The Sinfonietta’s previous festival collaborations have often been staid or twee, but this is a killer performance, with panicked electronics and Loke Rahbek’s digital-soothsayer vocals punctuated with stabs of violin and alarmed brass, animatedly marshalled by their conductor. There is a note of beautiful hope at the end, brought to life on a vast art deco organ by Kara-Lis Coverdale, who also performs an excellent solo set backed by melting geometries from visual artist MFO.
Unsound doesn’t really do headliners, but there are populist bookings. Matmos’s performance of Robert Ashley’s bonkers spoken-word opera Perfect Lives is indeed perfection: a workaday tale of Hopper-style nighthawks that draws in astrophysics, child development theories and boogie woogie, whipping it all into absurdly slippery kitsch. The narrator considers a sunset in terms of pure maths in the third act, backed with lap steel and tabla, and its blend of sentiment and reason is truly beautiful. Death Grips have Kraków’s teenagers moshing wildly with their industrial rap, sitting somewhere between Albert Ayler and Limp Bizkit, while Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein perform their soundtrack to Netflix watercooler smash Stranger Things. The former is as thrilling as the latter is staggeringly boring – dislocated from the TV show, Dixon and Stein’s simplistic compositions instantly wither.
Their weakness is all the more conspicuous billed next to truly masterful sound designers such as M.E.S.H., whose magnificently intricate work fairly blows apart the former cigarette factory it’s performed in. In the same room the day before, Wacław Zimpel shows off the weekend’s most idiosyncratic setup: an electric organ operated by a series of preprogrammed hammers, innumerable effects boxes, plus-sized pan pipes, and a bass clarinet played with Clarence Clemons-levels of cheesy passion – the result is Balearic euphoria.
At night, everything moves to the ballrooms of the Hotel Forum, a cold-war relic full of modernist chandeliers, wood panelling, and a restaurant incongruously dispensing pork dinners and plum cake to hungry ravers. In previous years, this venue has been where Unsound’s thematic concepts can drown in a sea of Żywiec lager, but there are plenty of smart and energetic dislocations. The debut of Uruguayan band F5 is a wild wedding disco full of poppy Afro-Latin rhythms played on live percussion, while new material from Liverpudlian producer Forest Swords is excellent, as rap production meets desert blues in a duet with the hotel’s rattling ceiling panels – hopefully perfect fodder for MC-laden remixes in future.
The arrival of Babyfather – the hip-hop group fronted by Dean Blunt – heralds what is probably the first ever utterance of “paigon” on Polish soil, and their set, built from grime slang, dub rhythm, industrial noise and Kate Bush samples, is hyper-British, even as it jabs the establishment. Two icons are born in Gaika and Yves Tumor, who each deliver apocalyptic punk-dancehall sermons, the former with giant anthemic melodies, the latter howling into the void dressed in bondage gear on the speaker stacks.
Errorsmith has the crowd barking in rapture like seals as he turns a deceptively minimal and mathematical sound palette into sheer funk. The most globally dislocated moment comes from DJ Fulltono, a Japanese artist playing Chicago footwork in Poland; he plays back-to-back with Traxman, whose 170bpm take on Strawberry Fields Forever further underlines footwork as profoundly psychedelic music.
May’s theory of national identity is occasionally given credence: witness the joy of Tajik band Samo as they play traditional music to a whooping crowd, unperturbed by substantial technical issues going on around them. Paired here with Lebanese techno producer Rabih Beaini, their national cultural differences are tangible and celebrated. A kind of beige global monoculture where local particularities are ironed out would be no kind of culture at all – but what Unsound does so well is to acknowledge locality and marry it to the universal.
What May fails to grasp – or doesn’t find politically expedient – is that for so many people now, identity is no longer about nationhood. You need only look at the clothing of the vast majority of both artists and audiences here – clean lines, near-fanatical blackness – to see that this is an intercontinental tribe who define themselves not by national borders or even local customs. Instead, there’s a shared spirit of adventure; the artists may have been dislocated physically, but they have an emotional common ground, all revelling in dread, joy, abandon, in uncompromised feeling of any kind. This festival was a reminder that, as cultural insularity grows, there are still global citizens who reject it absolutely.
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