So there's a fair chunk to catch up from the last post, but first of all I'll give a round up of Unsound Festival in Krakow 2 weeks ago.
Friday (22nd October) was lucky enough to be the day of my 23rd birthday, Unsound being the perfect event for the occassion. We didn't arrive into Krakow until late on friday, dropping our bags at the Gota dance studio, where we stayed for the weekend, kindly hosted by two lovely dudes. The festival was located among maybe 7 or 8 different venues across Krakow, which calls upon your map reading skills to be decent, but we managed. We caught some of
Mordant Music's (UK) film/installation of '
MisinforMation', which is a collaboration between the electronic musician and BFI, containing Public Information films about the UK, primarly from the 70s and 80s, including work by Peter Greenway, with an alternative soundtrack by Mordant Music. More information can be found
here. We later went to the Fabryka for some warped Techno and House sounds, though little stuck with me and we were pretty tired, so nothing special to speak of.
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| Novellor |
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| One of the many beautiful women of Krakow |
The first artists we caught on
Saturday (23rd) were in the
No Fun House of Horror, located in the Alchemina. The theme of this year's Unsound Festival was, '
Horror: the pleasure of fear and unease', which was a perfect subtext to rung underneath many of the performances. The venue was a pub and gig venue decorated in way which felt like a medieval torture chamber, overflowing with; candles, skulls, glass scupltures and stuffed animals.
Carlos Giffoni (USA) played first, initially grabbing me with a varied sound pallet of throbbing sub bass tones, scrapped contact mic sounds, harsh white noise outbursts and unpredictable sonic treats. But the set fell, I felt lazily,into an emphasis on a repeated arpeggiated melody, feeling far too out of context to work in the set, but overall, worthwhile. Second was a collaboration between artists,
Hijd Sofie Tafjord (Norway) and
Anna Zaradny (Poland), a clever and suprising mix of acoustic brass instrumentation, slow morphing sine waves, manipulated loops, extended techniques, and haunting human body sounds that all came together in a well formed and exciting improvised performance. Last to play was
Noveller (USA), a solo artist relying mainly on a electric guitar and loop pedal. Though sections of the performance and the small pieces were pleasing examples of overlapping simple harmonic lines, the feeling overall was half baked and predictable. Like with most performances relying heavily on a loop pedal, the dynamic range moves from quiet to loud to silence and the form often follows a similar suit, starting with nothing, building to a collage of sounds, then stopping.
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| Goblin |
The second performance of the day fell under the title of '
Fragments of Fear', held in a old tram station.
Joel Martin and Cherrystones (UK) were pretty dull, what I heard online works fine in a home listening environment, but it failed to be exciting in a live context, a one point mixing
Sunn0))) into a set filled with break beats and funk samples, confusing to say the least.
Emeralds (USA), on the the other hand, were one of the real highlights of the weekend, they've moved away from their slow moving, hazy and warm drone based sounds of earlier releases, see '
Solar Bridge', to sounds similar to Steve Reich's process music techniques, with a flurry of intense repeated patterns, though leaning on a tendency to improvise more and awash in delay and phasing effects. The feeling emitted was pleasing and electric. Their recent album, '
Does it look like I'm here?' falls into this later category of sounds.
Goblin (Italy) were the final act to play the
Fragments of Fear show. Though I enjoy horror films, the slasher/gore/shock styles have failed to excite me, I find most of them to be not actually horrific, rather laughable, maybe I'm missing the point, but Goblin gave me the same feeling. At times during the set I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, maybe I need to do more research, but their music wasn't particularly scary.
The closing event of the day was '
Bass Mutations', held at the Fabryka club, with the emphasis on warped sub bass sounds and Dubstep. We caught
Mount Kimbie (UK), who were a dissapointment, their set never building to anything and seemed to shy away from going anywhere exciting, plus their inclusion of live electric guitar and drums didn't compliment their music at all.
James Blake (UK) on the other hand was a welcome build of subtle dubstep, leading into
Terror Danjah's (USA) lively, varied and fun mix of; grime, dubstep, jungle and drum and bass, mixing in many classic tracks remixed by Terror Danjah and though worn out, I was determined to dance. He also slipped in '
Hyph Mngo' by
Joy Orbison, who unfortunatley couldn't play that night due to illness.
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| Ho Tzu Nyen's 'Earth' |
Sunday (24th) was a quieter day, starting with '
Don't go down there: An afternoon with Alan Howarth and Black to Comm'.
Black to Comm is based around German sound artist, Mark Richter, owner of the Dekorder label, of which I've been a fan for many years. Performing as a duo, the other performer I understand is his wife, provided an alternative soundtrack to
Ho Tzu Nyen's (Singapore) film, '
Earth', giving a feeling of welcome rest and sleep in an enviroment of apocalypse and destruction, with no movment from the actors, only simply from the slow panning cameras and ill working flashing lights. Unfortunatley, there was a technical problem so we only saw around 10 minutes of this film, though Black to Comm continued to play, with a slow moving and hypnotic collection of acoustic and electronic drones, field recordings and gentle progressions. Making the atmosphere of meditation which the best drone and ambient artists manage to produce so well.
Alan Howarth (USA) followed, the composer and sound designer for many of
John Carpenter's films, namely;
Poltergeist, Halloween, The Thing, They Live and Escape from New York and also worked on the
Star Trek films and the
Indiana Jones series. Playing a solo set with a synthesizer, midi controls and backing track to a set of clips and screen shots from many of the films he has composed for over the years. He later did a Q & A session which was a feast for sound nerds like myself, explaining the techniques of his sound design, the variety of technology he has employed in his time and the clever and experimental methods of his sound creating. There was also a deep inclusion of psychoacoustics, Fibonacci theory and infinity in relation to how we perceieve the world and our enviroment in sonic and visual terms, all in all, fascinating and inspirational.
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| Solaris (1972) |
"We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors." was the final and closing event of Unsound, which was music by
Ben Frost (Iceland) and
Daniel Bjarnason (Iceland) with the
Sinoniette Cracovia (Poland) and film manipulations of
Solaris,
Andrei Tarkovsky's (Russia) 1972 version, by
Brian Eno (UK) and
Nick Robertson (UK). The book, on which the film is based, was written by Krakow born author,
Stanisław Lem. Admittely, I have never the read the book or seen either versions of the film, so I feel I may have come to end point of a long drawn progressive art development, so in return to get the full feeling of it, I must watch the film and read the book. Anyway, for me, as a stand alone piece, I thoroughly enjoyed this special collaboration and felt it was a perfect end to the weekend. The music was; slow, sparse, minimal and delicate but also in points; burning, intense and captivating. The images were manipulated in ways that sharp angles and points became sharper and they slowly morphed into the next image, sometimes so gradual that you became lulled into a trance. I understand Ben Frost was dissatisfied with the original score for the Tarkovsky film as it didn't highlight the inner psychological conflict that was apparent in Lem's book, though I would find it difficult to comment on this comparison, Ben Frost's music was insular and cold and ultimatley, haunting.
Though, only seeing parts of the Old Town of Krakow, and as the festival was spread across parts of the city, it allowed us to explore, but unfortunatley not staying in one place for a decent amount of time. I know why people flock to Krakow as it is an incredibly beautiful city, though if you want to avoid tourists, be careful where you choose to go. Again, like with Lublin and Warsaw, I would happily go back and spend some time in the galleries and museums and do some of the essential tourist history stuff, plus there are many connections to Zakopane from Krakow. There are coaches to Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I feel I have to see during my time in Poland here.
Food wise, we found two Vegan friendly eateries, from the guidebook. The first was Vega, with wholesome and traditional Polish and Eastern European food, in a Vegan fashion, with the atmosphere of someone's cosy village home. The second was Moma, a kind of Vegetarian and Vegan co-operative, with an emphasis on non-GM produce, locally sourced foods and all at decent prices.
