Unsound is a festival of experimental and electronic music and art founded in Kraków in 2003 by the Australian novelist Mat Schulz with the American Stephen Berkley. It began as a small do-it-yourself event in the city’s cellar clubs and grew after Gosia Płysa joined in 2006 as executive director and set up the non-profit organisation that runs it.
Each edition is organised around a theme, from interference and dislocation to presence and the future, and concerts are staged in unusual spaces: brutalist hotels such as the Hotel Forum, churches, salt mines and post-industrial halls. Slow, heavy and drone-based music has had a constant place in the programme. Ben Frost has been a long-standing collaborator, and Tim Hecker developed work with the festival, including Ephemera, a project combining sound and scent. Unsound has also produced editions abroad, notably in New York and Adelaide.