- Krakow may be known for its breathtakingly beautiful architecture and cheap alcohol, but that isn't all that it's got going for it. Dubbed as Poland's "capital of culture," the city is host to many festivals throughout the year. The most cutting-edge of these is Unsound, which celebrated its fourth year of having a full week-long programme in 2009. While there certainly is a lot of electronic music showcased at Unsound, the festival also shines a light on plenty of avant-garde and ambient acts, hosting performances in upmarket and idiosyncratic venues like the Philharmonic Hall and St Catherine's Church.
The success of these shows were mixed, with performances ranging from the majestically moving (James Blackshaw's rousing 12-string guitar work and Stars Of The Lid's one-off collaboration with Sinfinietta Cracovia being particular highlights) through to the downright tedious (Jóhann Jóhannsson's inordinately syrupy orchestral lethargy), with some gratingly pretentious Björk-lite wailing thrown in from Austria's Soap & Skin. The festival's real strength this year, however, was its impeccably selected choice of electronic music, with house, techno and dubstep all getting a look in over the course of Unsound's final four nights.
The Manggha Centre of Japanese Art and Technology was home to the night parties running from Thursday through to Saturday, the first of which focused on live performance. The single-roomed venue was set up in a unique fashion, with a set of stairs behind the sound booth acting as several rows of seats as well as a route down to the dance floor. This arrangement worked well over the course of the festival, offering the weary a place to relax while still being able to hear the full force of the music. Norwegian math-rockers Next Life were the first act to hit the audience-level stage, blasting through a raucous selection of short but dynamic arrangements with plenty of well executed stop-start shenanigans.
Enjoyable if only for their novelty, the same can't really be said for Moishe Moishe Moishele, whose Hasidic acid house shtick wore thin rather quickly. The locals seemed to be eating it up, but apart from a few choice TB-303 samples, there was very little else to shout about. Thankfully, Kadebostan was on hand to offer the first real electronic highlight of the festival, teaming up with six musicians from Belarus for an energetic jam session that combined the Freude Am Tanzen producer's bubbling beats with live keyboards, sax, violin, guitar and electric double bass. Even with this amount of musicians involved, the conduction and structure of the set seemed very controlled, but the enthusiasm and enjoyment of the players was clear for all to see, radiating through the enraptured audience. Serafin closed out the night with a Mountain People DJ set, which maintained a solid flow throughout but lacked the inspirational moments that could have elevated it beyond a typical European deep house set.
All was not lost for fans of house and techno, as Friday's "Detroit Mutations" bash posed a truly mouth-watering line-up, even though Omar-S was the only act actually from the city. The FXHE boss was redlining the mixer a little too much for my liking (especially as the sound system provided was more than ample), but laid down an enjoyable set of classic house and techno interspersed with some of his own tracks. Not one to stick to one style for more than a single track, he mixed up vintage acid screamers, jazzy house and deeper jams in a simple but effective fashion, making sure to drop a few crowd pleasers like "House Nation" along the way. The Bunker's promoter and resident DJ Spinoza preceded him with a well-paced warm up, teasing the early crowd with a few jazzy trip-hop cuts before dropping into a mix of tech-house, techno and Sähko-esque minimalism. Martyn clearly relished the opportunity of playing after Omar-S, opening with Fingers Inc. "Bring Down The Walls" and continuing with a succession of Chicago and Detroit tracks before mixing funky with his own material.
Robert Henke was almost inescapable over the course of the festival, appearing on two panel discussions as well as appearing in Speaking In Code, a documentary light on insight and heavy on indulgence. Henke's childlike enthusiasm for music and sound is one of the saving graces of the film, and was definitely apparent as he performed his surround sound live set as Monolake. No hyperbole intended, but his performance was probably the best dance floor-geared live show that I've ever witnessed. A crowd reaction bordering on hero worship spurred Henke on, his complex steppy techno becoming increasingly jacking, steamrolling on while constantly mutating into new rhythms and sounds. The last time I reviewed a Marcel Dettmann DJ set, I was distinctly unimpressed with his monotony, something that was refreshingly absent from his tag-team set with Shed. Dettmann's skeletal beats worked well with Shed's raw house and techno selections, and the pair carried on long after the lights had come up, ending the night with the flickering melodies of Aphex Twin's "On."
RA co-hosted Saturday night's "Bass Mutations" party, which had promise to be a great showcase of where forward thinking bass music's at in 2009. As he has done so many times before, Zomby cancelled his appearance at the last minute, leaving Stefen Betke to fill in with a live Pole set. However passable his sturdy performance was, Betke's sleek house and techno sound unfortunately fell flat on its face, ruining the momentum that had been steadily building over the night. Pavel Ambiont kicked things off with some subdued minimalist halfstep, but it was down to 2562 to get the Polish dancers going with his clinically mixed selection of techy dubstep rollers. Huismans favours a more linear DJing style than his peers, but his Unsound set was a typical example of how he uses different percussive styles to create interesting dynamics.
Things had reached fever pitch by the middle of Untold's set, his manic and unpredictable bass-heavy sound clearly striking a chord with Krakow's more hardened dubsteppers. Kode9 & The Spaceape's live set was apparently heavy on new material from their forthcoming album, marrying pitch black dubstep with plenty of swung beats and serious sub-low frequencies. It was an impressive show, but once Kode hit the decks with a flurry of funky anthems like Altered Natives' "Rass Out," and Grievous Angel's "Move Down Low" proceedings again took off, with Spaceape even eschewing his usual position under the desk to wander through the crowd in an uncharacteristically rousing fashion. It was almost a blessing that Betke had managed to clear half of the floor with his set, giving the dancers who stayed for Ikonika a little bit of room for the final two hours. Her mixing may have been a little loose at times, but there was no arguing with her tune selection, rattling through unreleased material from Deadboy, Roska, Guido and Joker with a few classics like "Midnight Request Line" sprinkled in along the way.
By this point I could've taken my flight home a happy man, but Sunday presented yet another full evening of sonic delights, starting off with Unsound's "American Doom" showcase. Fittingly enough for Sunn O)))'s punishing wall of bass, their performance took place in an old Stalinist factory in the suburbs of Krakow, and while the interior wasn't half as industrial as I'd first imagined, the group's beatless bone-shaking cacophony offered a visceral sonic experience unlike any other. Once we were back in Krakow's city centre (making the journey back on a bus numbered 666, no less), Philip Sherburne was taking over from a local DJ's selection of rowdy bass music, wiping the slate clean with some broken organic percussion before launching into an impeccably structured set of house and techno which managed to take the dance floor from empty to heaving by its end. Pantha Du Prince followed with a mix of delicate melodies and bumping grooves, leaving Wolf + Lamb affiliate Smirk and celebrated Polish DJ Bshosa to close proceedings with their respective sets of jaunty house and vintage Detroit techno.
When comparing Unsound to the majority of festivals currently on offer in Europe, it's very difficult to fault it. While other events may offer more choice of parties and a higher quantity of acts, Unsound's meticulous artist programming and sound engineering made it incredibly difficult to even think about wanting to be anywhere else. Couple that with the ridiculously cheap ticket price for the entire weekend (translating to under 50 Euros for an entire week's worth of entertainment) and similarly priced accommodation and drinks, and you've got yourself quite a festival, and one that should certainly become an increasingly attractive prospect for travelling revellers come the 2010 season.
Photo credits
Moishe Moishe Moishele - Krzysztof Sokalla
Monolake, Ikonika, Sunn O))) - Anna Spysz