Poland Unsound: October 4th - 11th, 2023

With some things squared away in Liverpool, we were ready to take a vacation from our vacation and spend about a week in Kraków, Poland, for the Unsound Music Festival. Poland Unsound is a music festival that "focuses on a broad swath of contemporary music — emerging, experimental, and leftfield — whose sweep doesn't follow typical genre constraints". Basically a bunch of weird music that I like to listen to and Susan finds herself enjoying a surprising amount of the time. I'd wanted to attend Unsound for years, ever since I read about an event there where Burial performed underground in some salt mines (more on the salt mines later), so I was super excited for this part of the trip to finally be happening :).

Our RyanAir flight left fairly early in the morning, so at about 4 AM we groggily shouldered our packs and stumbled groggily (and as quietly as we could) out of our hosts' home to start the ~40 minute walk to John Lennon International Airport, doing our best to stay on pedestrian paths and out of any restricted areas. After just a few hours in the air we touched down at John Paul II airport in Kraków and had our first of many excellent experiences with public transport in Kraków. It was super easy to take the train to the center of the city and dirt cheap!

We got into the city a bit too early to check in to our rental, so we had a few hours to kill in the train station. It was a good opportunity to get some złoty from the ATM, wander around a Biedronka for a week's worth of groceries, and get a little lost because the train station was also a multi-story mall and also connected to a different mall in a configuration we never really did figure out.

When the text came through that we could check in we hurried over to the apartment building where we'd have a studio unit rented for the week; we'd made this reservation all the way back in Bozeman, when we still had jobs and income, so had "splashed out" (for us anyway) for a place we thought would be nice and comfortable. And the apartment met our expectations - small but super comfortable, with a kitchenette and private bathroom with consistent hot water! What a luxury to just live like regular people for a week! We had a little trouble with the building door (accidentally locking everyone out and in at one point, with a woman shouting in Polish on the other side) but really this was an oasis after feeling drained from the last part of our trip.

One thing remained before we were ready for a good time, though - clothes shopping. We knew we'd never fit in with all the cool kids at the concerts in our worn out biking and climbing outfits, and this seemed like probably our only chance to dress like we lived indoors in a city or something, so we'd better take it. Kraków has plenty of secondhand and thrift shops so we scooped up some pants, shirts, and dresses before getting lost in the mall (again) and grabbing a few last things from H&M and the Polish equivalent of Payless Shoes. Susan got a pair of chunky black stomping shoes with thick soles that fit better with the disaffected youth and made her taller than me. We did our best to make Hayden proud! (but probably could've used his advice)

With an armful of shopping bags we took advantage of a little kebab stand to grab some spicy & delicious dinner and a couple coffees to prepare for a late night - big city amenities! - then rushed back to the studio apartment, got dressed, and rushed back out. Our first Unsound event was a performance at the Filharmonia Krakowska by Polish composers Teoniki Rożynek and Aleksandra Słyż, followed by an impressive show from Keeley Forsyth. Forsyth's collaborator, Matthew Bourne, matched her powerful vocal deliveries on guitar, piano, and the imposingly beautiful organ of the philharmonic center. As Forsyth pushed her voice to fill the auditorium during the crescendo of a song, Bourne transformed into a spirit, flying across the keys and pedals of the organ to create an overwhelming sonic experience. It was a super cool way to start our time at the festival!

Keeley Forsyth and Matthew Bourne performing at the philharmonic center

After the show at the philharmonic we took an easy tram ride across the Vistula river (have I mentioned how great Kraków's public transport is?) and went to the Hotel Forum, where we attended the Unsound Opening Party. We wandered past a carnival and around the numerous bars and restaurants occupying the ground floor of this formerly abandon Soviet-Era hotel, where trees and foliage droop from the balconies of long-defunct rooms, searching for the entrance to Club 89, the former strip club in the hotel basement that was hosting the opening party. In a sequence we'd repeat several times this week, a series of Unsound flyers kept pointing us in the right direction, a little treasure map leading us somewhere we wouldn't have thought we belonged except for the throngs of smokers outside and the bass rumbling from within.

A carnival to guide us towards the Hotel Forum

Hotel Forum at night; you can just make out the forest reclaiming the old balconies

At the opening party we first enjoyed the eclectic rhythms selected by Moroccan DJ OJOO. I was most excited for the live set from Blawan, a UK artist whose sludgy and body-rattling dub-techno I'd grown fond of in Norway. The small, rosy venue was packed and hot and a little smoky from all the artificial fog but Susan and I had a lot of fun dancing until the wee hours of the morning. The earplugs we picked up in Liverpool quickly proved their worth as the sound system could have handled a space 10 times the size.

Unsound opening party at Club 89

Eventually we realized we'd been awake for almost 24 hours and decided to call it a night, but joked that all our long days in the mountains had given us the endurance to stay awake and go to parties. We were nervous about getting home at such an odd hour, but lo and behold, Kraków had a night-bus service running! For just a couple bucks we rode back home and stumbled into bed. Last time, but I still have to extol the virtues of Kraków's public transit!

Thursday was calmer; we slept in reaaaaaal late (hey, we needed to reset our internal clocks for our newfound nocturnal lifestyle) and basically just lounged around the apartment all day until it was time to head out for some events. Sadly we missed out on tickets for the Thursday evening concerts, but we did have passes for the late-night club programming happening at Kamienna 12, a former railway cargo depot retrofitted with space for food and drink vendors, some improvised seating, and two warehouse stages flanked by stacks and stacks of massive speakers. After enjoying our third coffees of the day at about 10:30 PM we were ready to head out for another fun night of weird music.

Starting out we saw Iceboy Violet, who didn't even use the stage and instead wandered among the crowd as he delivered his noisy, damaged, queer raps, connecting intensely with individual fans. Lust$ickPuppy followed, and while I'd been mildly interested in her performance it didn't seem to resonate with the crowd. EYE, a former member of Japanese noise-rock lodestars Boredoms, presented a frenetic DJ set at turns abrasive, melodic, mind-expanding, and always surprising in the best possible way. Finally, we stayed for part of a much more upbeat set from Olof Dreijer, half of Swedish electronic duo The Knife, but even though I really wanted to see the artist JASSS perform we couldn't quite stay up for her 4 AM set time. After another late and really fun night, it was time to sleep the rest of the morning away.

EYE performing at Unsound

Olof Dreijer performing at Unsound

Friday morning was the first of two "Ambient Brunch" sessions at the restaurant of PURO hotel, so the alarm roused us at the early morning hour of 11 and we went to enjoy some delicious baked goods and coffee to shake off last night's grog. Claire Rousay DJ'd some of her favorite ambient tunes while we squeezed in among all the co-workers on Macbooks (it was a Friday, after all). The atmosphere of a bustling cafe with conversations in foreign languages blending at different volumes wove with the music and brought the "ambient" experience up a meta-level.

We spent too long doing research for later in the trip and barely made it across town to catch a discussion I was really interested in on ways of looking at AI involvement in music (the theme for Unsound 2023 was Dada, with a heavy focus on "data" (get it?) and the impact of AI advancements on music). Jennifer Walshe gave a really interesting analysis and several useful ways for framing how AI is shaping modern music, although one of her points was that stuff like this has actually been happening for hundreds of years (see Mozart's Musical Dice Game). I remember her analogy that AI is like an energy drink - no one really knows what it is but it helps you get things of questionable value done faster. Susan remembers the analogy that AI is like a puppy - if you don't train it the way you want it's just going to piss on things.

Seeing a bit of Kraków's old town

Susan, looking SUPER CUTE in non-outdoorsy clothes, in front of St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków's main square

Jennifer Walshe's presentation at Unsound

Friday evening found us at the Łaźnia Nowa Theatre for a slate of interesting acts headlined by IDM luminaries Autechre. During the opening shows we really enjoyed watching and dancing as Guatemalan artist Mabe Fratti performed songs that blurred the lines between Latin music, jazz, rock, and electronics (with the help of I. La Católica, Hubert Zemler and the Spółdzielnia Muzyczna contemporary ensemble), and also seeing Jennifer Walshe for the second time that day, although now she was blowing Susan's mind by doing things with her voice to create noises neither of us thought could come out of a human.

Mabe Fratti and co's performance at Unsound

Autechre finally took the stage, and I was excited to experience these pioneers of electronic music and synthesis perform live. Their MO is to perform in complete darkness, implore the audience not to start up their phones, and also ask people to avoid too much movement, which all added up to a profound sonic experience. Standing in the pitch black auditorium, feeling waves of roiling, soothing, pulsing, quaking, gentle, manic sounds wash over me, focusing on nothing but what this duo can do with the electrons flowing through their digital and analog instruments, was a unique and unforgettable concert experience. Susan loved it too :).

Even though we had passes to the late-night club events again, I wasn't too interested in anyone in particular and we were both feeling a little ragged, so we went back home and instead of having what was becoming a customary coffee and rum at about 10:30 PM actually turned in for bed before midnight.

Saturday we enjoyed waking up with another Ambient Brunch, this one featuring Antonina Nowacka, and then headed towards the city center to spend the day before the nighttime events. We visited the Cloth Market and Susan picked up a lovely amber bracelet, since historically Poland was renowned for its amber production and craftsmanship. Next was a trip to the art museum housed above the Cloth Market (how convenient!), where we got to appreciate works by some of Poland's finest painters and also contemplate the fact that many pieces are still missing because the Germans looted the art during WWII.

The Cloth Hall in Kraków's main square

Susan admiring some works in The Gallery of 19th-Century Polish Art

"Introduckja [Introduction]" - Jacek Malczewski

"Wschód księżyca [Moonrise]" - Stanisław Masłowski

On the far side of the Vistula river we found the Cricoteka building and followed another trail of Unsound posters to "After Words", an art installation presented as part of the festival. "After Words" was an audio presentation of several different scripts written in collaboration with an AI language model, performed mainly using repurposed audio from computational training data sets. The overall experience was disorienting, but also very thought provoking, as keying into and considering key bits of the script showed how the training for some of these AI models takes place and the implications of that when it comes time for the system to make a decision or do something "useful".

Feeling a vague sense of unease, but also hunger, we wandered into one of Kraków's finest milk-bars, a holdover of the Soviet-era where workers could get a state-subsidized lunch, and enjoyed some very affordable home-style food to take our minds off impending AI apocalypses.

Ben in the Old Town, wearing a really nice sweater he was sad to leave behind

Back at home and recaffeinated for the night we headed down to Kamienna 12 for another slew of late-night programming. We caught most of Tirzah's dubbed-out, hazy performance, before Nick León came on and put on a rollicking, Latin-skewing set that had us dancing with abandon. The tone shifted when Julien Desprev staged an "In(ter)vention" in the middle of the crowd and athletically tap-danced across his arsenal of effects pedals to generate inconceivable noises with one electric guitar. That noisy onslaught paved the way for Shapednoise, accompanied with an audio/visual show from Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, and this artist basically provided ego-death via bass. After about 20-30 minutes Susan had to leave, and even though I stayed for the entire show it felt like an endurance event as he pummeled the audience with dance and hip-hop mangled into extreme industrial noise. It was pretty neat.

Nick León performing at Unsound

Julien Desprev's In(ter)vention at Unsound

Shapednoise performing at Unsound

The "subversive reggaeton" of the next act proved to be pretty standard and mild (by comparison, at least), so we wandered into the other room and caught a good chunk of OKO DJ's set; she blew my mind with her ability to smoothly weave EDM and rave music with nu-metal and Radiohead tracks. But night was growing long and staring down the morning at almost 4 AM we caught a ride back to our apartment to sleep til noon.

The last day of the festival didn't have too much going on (we'd missed out on tickets for the early evening event), so we decided to try to act like healthy go-getters and went to a climbing gym in Kraków. It was actually really neat seeing their gym and how things are done a little differently, and they had a unique wall with inset holds that was the closest imitation I've ever seen to real, outdoor rock.

We did have tickets for the festival closing party, and confidently found our way back to Club 89 beneath the Hotel Forum at about 11 PM. But as we enjoyed a couple drinks and some of the acts (well, I enjoyed them, Susan made fun of phil in a maze for just being more bass on bass), we could also feel our energy rapidly deteriorating. Stepping outside for some fresh air, we decided it was a little silly to force ourselves to stay out when all we wanted was some sleep, and made our way home a little after 1:30 like a couple of lame-o's.

After the end of the festival we still had two more days in Kraków; heading home a little bit earlier helped us wake up in time to catch our tour of the Wieliczka Salt Mine on Monday. This is an amazing cultural and historical part of Poland, an immense and labyrinthine mine that operated from the 1200's up until the 1990's to extract rock salt for further refinement into food salt. For much of history salt was a relatively rare and precious commodity, and the mine was a major source of Poland's might in Europe during the medieval and renaissance periods.

Descending down the shafts of the Wieliczka Salt Mine

Statues carved in rock salt depicting the folk story behind the founding of the mine

A rock salt statue of Casimir III the Great

But aside from the sheer scale and historical aspects of the mine, it's also something of an art museum. Over time people had carved many statues left throughout the mine, depicting famous figures and Polish legends. We saw some of the most impressive work in the cathedral, a massive room excavated by the miners and exquisitely decorated for religious services (and maybe a little bit out of boredom). It was a truly unique place.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine cathedral

Intricate relief panels adorning the cathedral's walls

Ben in the cathedral with its many chandeliers

Susan in the cathedral with its immaculate stonework

Looking back towards the top entrance to the cathedral, admiring the architecture of the massive cavern

Doing the tour earlier in the day left us with some time to visit one of the board game cafes dotted around the city; Kraków is awesome! We went to the one located just down the street from our apartment, ordered some amazing tea, and managed to find a game that mostly relied on pictures and colors (so we didn't have to work through too many Polish-language instructions). What a nice, pleasant, normal touristy day.

Playing Azul in a charming little board game cafe

On our last full day in Poland we took a tour through the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration and extermination camps from WWII. So that was heavy.

The gate of Aushwitz I concentration/extermination camp

The entrance of Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp

Memorial for the upwards of one million victims of the Aushwitz and Birkenau concentration and extermination camps

But, alas, eventually we had to end our vacation-within-a-vacation, ditch all of our newly acquired cute clothes back at a thrift shop, bid goodbye to our oh-so-comfortable studio apartment, and fly back to to Liverpool to return to our lives as soggy, cheap, slow cycle tourists. Ellie and Tom, our Airbnb hosts in Liverpool, had kindly stashed our pile of bags in their shed, so all our stuff was there waiting for us on our return; now we just needed to get the bikes back!