Unsound, the long-running festival of experimental and electronic music that takes place every year in Krakow, Poland, have announced the first names for the 2013 edition of the festival. Running from October 13th to October 20th, this year’s festival takes place under the theme of INTERFERENCE, and will again find them putting on events at various venues scattered around the city. After last year’s apocalyptic The End, it’s another timely concept, touching on the way that many emergent trends in electronic music are concerned with grit, decay, distortion and scrambled rhythms.
The first set of acts, which have been announced today, suggest that this year’s edition of the festival is going to be as wide-ranging an affair as ever. Heading up the bill are Porter Ricks – the Chain Reaction dub techno duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Koner, who reissued their seminal Biokinetics album last year. An exciting prospect indeed, given that this will be the duo’s first live show together in years (in our recent interview with Koner, he hinted that some more Porter Ricks work might have been in the pipeline).
The rest of the bill thus far is impressively broad ranging. There’s doomy, all-enveloping weight from Kevin Martin’s King Midas Sound and Earth. Robert Henke, aka Monolake, will present a brand new audiovisual show entitled Lumiere. Footwork pioneer RP Boo will be playing his first ever European set at the festival, following on from his newly released Legacy album, which is one of our editors’ picks of 2013 thus far. Poland’s Stefan Wesołowski wil be debuting a new show based on his Liebestod LP, released through Important Records, and we’re promised that the bill will contain many more Polish acts.
The first set of announced names is rounded off by Swedish free jazz/punk trio Fire!, Hamburg’s Helena Hauff (who is just about to release a cassette via Blackest Ever Black), Stellar OM Source (fresh from the release of her upcoming Joy One Mile LP), Camella Lobo’s Tropic Of Cancer, Blawan and Pariah’s stormy techno duo Karenn, New York deep house/techno head DJ Qu, and Sacred Bones-signed noise artist Pharmakon.
"[INTERFERENCE] relates to the physics of sound, including the overlay of varied sound waves and rhythms, distortion, disrupted audio, sonic disturbance, and the act of obstructing or impeding. More than ever before, these elements are used in a wide range of contemporary music, from the developing noise scene to ever- evolving club music," reads the Unsound 2013 press release.
"Additionally, the theme will be explored for its social and cultural significance, questioning the meaning of "underground" in today’s networked, commodified and data-driven world. INTERFERENCE will set this year’s Unsound festival on the amorphous border between entertainment and challenging experience, often playing against the easy consumption of music and demanding engagement from audiences. You won’t find huge headliners at Unsound. It won’t be transmitted via the Internet in easy video chunks. But for one week the festival will create a unique temporary autonomous zone for audience and artists alike that will feel like nowhere else. The theme will also manifest itself via the placement of unique installations and performances in unusual spaces."
For more information and tickets, click here to visit the Unsound website.
