From A.V. Club: Live Report: Krakow’s Unsound Festival by Andy Battaglia. Check out the entire article and some really nice photos.

I almost puked in a club in a Stalinist suburb in Poland, and not for any of the reasons I had ever almost puked before, in a club or anywhere else. The cause was straightforward enough, but it only really makes sense in context.

I went to Krakow, Poland, at the end of October for Unsound, an ambitious music festival whose bill included a week’s worth of performances by a disparate lot: Stars Of The Lid, Omar-S, Sunn O))), Kode 9, Grouper, Johann Johannsson, Pole, Monolake, Nico Muhly, Biosphere, 2562, Ben Frost, and a group of Hasidic Jews from France who played gleaming blue keytar in front of smiling Stars of David, to name just a few. The mix was all over the place, and the mood followed suit.

The mood of Krakow, as much as could be gleaned during a fleeting week there, was rich. The city itself is beautiful and more than a little eerie. Some of the buildings, including an enormous castle right in the city center, date back to the 11th century. Certain statues and gargoyles could probably get active status in an actors’ guild, so expressive are their writhing gestures and anguished looks. Images of dragons proliferate. At least one of the countless churches open to leering boasts desiccated skulls as decoration. The whole city, especially at night, looks fantastic in a fog.

The Unsound Festival, started in 2003, is one of a group of municipally minded music festivals that belong to a burgeoning collective known as I.C.A.S., or International Cities Of Advanced Sound. Others include Mutek in Montreal, Club Transmediale in Berlin, Dis-patch in Belgrade, Sperm Festival in Prague, and Communikey in Boulder, Colorado. Each shares an affinity for electronic and experimental music, as well as the artier ends of indie-rock and classical composition. Each also answers for a stated ethos that —favors quality, critical reflection, innovation and exchange over profit.— (Disclosure: I went to Krakow as a guest of Unsound, both to cover the festival and to help plan an Unsound offshoot to happen in New York in February 2010.)

Unsound 2009 got off to a disquieting start. Opening night featured a contemplative set by the Polish composer Jacaszek, who traffics in ambient sounds haunted by churchly voices and slathered with strings. He played a laptop, backed by cello and violin, in a serene Japanese art museum called Manggha. A crowd of several hundred sat rapt, especially during a piece that played alongside a black-and-white video of swallows swooping in ethereal formation. After the concert came a screening of Beats Of Freedom, a documentary about revolutionary music in Poland from the 1960s to the fall of Communism in the late ’80s. It was startling, as a visitor, to watch such a film in the presence of an audience for whom the notion of —revolutionary music— is both recent and very real. It was even more startling to hear such an audience throw up its hands and laugh away chilling tales of secret-police interrogations and spells of military aggression—”laughter as absurdist rejoinder…