Mount Kimbie

One’s experience of a festival usually occurs at the gastric level, monkey-hopping from one hangover and stomach complaint to the next.

What time isn’t spent on ingestion and indigestion is given over to marvelling at the arbitrariness of the zeitgeist and the acts associated with it, and at the fact that people are willing to spend hundreds of pounds to dispense with their critical faculties. I should add that I tend to enjoy festivals immensely, it’s just that I feel they usually deprive me of as much as they give me. I don’t believe in them, fundamentally, and I don’t feel engaged; I do my best to loot them for what I can and then I move on. Festivals make gluttons and parasites of us all, and I don’t go to these events to discover new art and music, I go to be reminded of how selfish and stupid I can be (very selfish, very stupid), and how many cigarettes I can smoke in a day (around 50).

Unsound, in Krakow, is the exception that proves the bitter rule. It’s a fine balance to lay on sufficiently diverse and numerous entertainments to keep a large ticket-buying audience interested, without overwhelming the individual, but this wonderful festival succeeds in just that, and emphatically so. Unsound currently obeys one very important law, a function of the measure and intimacy that defines its every aspect: there are no clashes. Events do not take place simultaneously. You do not have to miss one thing in order to see another. As as result, the entire festival had a unity to it, and an unbroken narrative arc – you feel as if you’re being guided through something, rather than simply being bombarded with consumer choices weighted towards the familiar (hotdog or pizza?). At Unsound the curator is king, which is how it should be. While it clearly strives to appeal to a wide range of punters, there’s no attempt to over-indulge or patronise festival-goers, and most importantly this is a festival that takes its time. Events are spread over nine days, which means there’s none of the beat-the-clock stress and urgency of the typical weekender, and out of this leisurely pacing a genuine sense of community and continuity is allowed to arise.

As befits Krakow, a breathtakingly pretty town that seems to have Catholic psycho-drama inscribed into its every surface, the 2010 edition of Unsound was gothic as hell.

As befits Krakow, a breathtakingly pretty town that seems to have Catholic psycho-drama inscribed into its every surface, the 2010 edition of Unsound was gothic as hell. The organisers played to the city’s strengths, constantly changing up the venues – I found myself in churches, cafes, art galleries, museums, cinemas, concert halls, warehouses -  unlike your average urban festival, which quickly becomes a tiresome case of trudging to the same venue day after day. The theme was horror, a sufficiently general but pregnant precept to assemble a diverse range of artists from across genres and disciplines, and one which gave the festival a very satisfying shape without being allowed to suffocate it (I mean, there’s nothing horror about, say, James Blake, but that didn’t stop them booking him). With so many festivals rallying around a hollow notion of “the cutting edge”, Unsound’s desire to put more ancient feelings of “fear and unease” at its centre was refreshing to say the least, and somehow more appropriate to the way we live now.

Zombie Zombie

When we think of horror, we think of horror movies, and so it made sense that film should be an important component of Unsound 2010. Peerless connoisseurs of the video nasty, Jigoku (Lovely Jon and Cherrystones), curated a week of midnight shockers transferred direct from VHS in order to retain the degraded feel that’s crucial to their enduring character. The stand-out screening for me was the first, The Headless Eyes (Kent Bateman, 1971) – a seemingly scriptless, maniacal slice of New York exploitation cinema that tells the tale of a down-at-heel artist with a predilection for murdering women and stealing their eyes (think Ferrara’s Driller Killer, but considerably more unhinged), all set to a nuts electronic surf-jazz soundtrack as addictive as it is out-of-place. Similarly zonked, skronky sounds abounded in Jigoku’s DJ set later in the week, warming up for Oneohtrix Point Never, Lindstrom and Zombie Zombie. I’ve always been unimpressed by Zombie Zombie – their latest album, a John Carpenter tribute album, seems like a ridiculous idea, as what on earth has this duo ever been but a John Carpenter tribute band? – but their being joined on-stage here by Alan Howarth, Carpenter’s long-time soundtrack collaborator and an intrepid sonic explorer in his own right, lent the show a dignity, unpredictability and cultural interest that for me it would have otherwise lacked. Howarth turned out to be one of the stars of the festival, shining as a personality as well as an artist and craftsman in various talks, workshops and solo performances.

Knowing how and when to impose their own personality on proceedings is a rare but crucial skill for a live scoring band to learn.

Less self-consciously trashy cinematic delights came in the form of a live re-scoring of Haxan, Benjamin Christensen’s legendary 1922 docu-fantasia on witchcraft and devilry. Quite simply one of the most visually inspired and disturbing films ever made, it’s a bold and possibly foolhardy idea to try and match it sonically, but Miasmah artist Elegi, cellist Marcin Maczynski and soprano Jolanta Kowalska acquitted themselves reasonably well. For me, Elegi’s ominous drone constructs lacked bite and individuality, and at times seemed rather arbitrary in their relationship to on-screen goings-on, but they did provide a fine setting for the vocalisations of Kowalska, who succeeded in evoking suffering and hysteria without resorting to shrill histrionics. Perversely enough, I think the trio would have come across far better without the filmic backdrop, just as it would have been more powerful to see Haxan shorn of the trio’s soundtrack.

Polish double act Sza/Za were an uncomplicated delight, nimbly scoring a number of fiendishly brilliant Roman Polanski shorts in chamber jazz style with clarinet, violin and and looping pedals. Their music perfectly matched the impish humour and bravura flourishes of the young Polanski’s narratives; they brought the on-screen images to life without distracting from them, and yet the pair somehow managed still to give a performance of sorts. Their placing on stage was undoubtedly significant: angled so that they were half facing the audience and half facing Polanski’s images, their responses felt genuine and immediate; their musical interventions seemed to literally bounce of the screen. Knowing how and when to impose their own personality on proceedings is a rare but crucial skill for a live scoring band to learn, and Sza/Za seem to have it it down.

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