Unsound 2010 Part 1 (+ some gig action)

It’s been a couple of weeks now but with one thing and another I haven’t gotten around to sitting down properly to re-collect my thoughts on the Unsound festival which took place over the last weekend of October in Krakow, over in Poland. And before I go into that just gonna give a heads up on a couple of gigs this week. I’m playing before Los Angeles based GB this Friday down in Galway in the Beirhaus with things kicking off around 9ish. I’d not come across the guy till he was booked to play over here, but he seems to do a fairly tasty line in live analogue workouts, covering house, electro and other bizness. His Xpander ep from this year is pretty great, and you can check it here. He’s also playing on the Thursday night for !Kaboogie here in Dublin in The Sweeney Mongrel on Dame Lane. Also playing in the Dublin gig is local electro chap DeFeKt who’s latest 12 just dropped and is some pretty solid electro fair. Both gigs are free in…

And so, on to the festival…

Wednesday and Thursday
I arrived in to Krakow on Tuesday evening after a painfully dull and long train ride from Berlin and opted against hitting anything that night bar a pub for a couple of drinks. The festival had been running from Sunday night but it was still fairly low key when we arrived with there only being one gig a night and a couple other bits and pieces on. Things would pick up over the weekend with the likes of Zombie, Zombie, Kyle Hall, Goblin, Actress and Tim Hecker set to perform.

Each day there would be a bunch of different work shops and discussions, some of which I planned on attending, but as is the way I only made it to one, on Wednesday afternoon, with Phillip Sherburne and Andy Battaglia giving a Q&A on music journalism, which was solid enough if hardly revelatory. The highlight of it was some barmy chick from Detroit who started ranting and raving about gangsta rap, being a social worker and wanting to blog to “get that shit out there”. Not really sure what shit she was talking about, but gladly Sherburne managed to turn her off after a few minutes. Even though she did pipe up again later on where she also managed to bring child molestation into the equation too. Strange.

Anyways, time for some music. We headed out to Manggha, a sort of non-descript hall for the “Apocalypse Now” night which would have a metal bent to it. Before the metal we got Jazkamer a noise trio who’s baragge of sound got a bit dull after a while. It was pretty much relentless for the half hour or so with a guitarist just making noise – and it has to be pointed out, anyone of us could have done what he was at – while a guy with a few bits of gear – including what looked like a electronic washboard – made, eh, more indecipherable noise. Their saving grace was the drummer who seemed fairly hell bent on wrecking his kit. He also had an endless supply of cymbals he would pick up and beat the shit out of the kit with, while constantly changing tempos and rythyms. It was the sort of performance where you could see the odd person in the crowd looking serious while nodding in time even though there was absolutely no structure to it at all and nothing to nod ones head to.

Monno brought everything down to a thudding doomy grind and were rather brilliant. Swapping guitar for saxophone (which sort of sounded like a guitar) they played 3 streched out doom workouts which were heavy as fuck, loud as fuck and pretty superb. Headliners Shining ruined any chance of the night finishing on a high note with a laughably silly performance of metal that thinks its way heavier than it is reality. Their incorporation of a saxaphone was far less succesfull than Monno though the arrival of the electronic sax amusingly brought the performance fully in to the realm of Spinal Tap. Not the strongest start to the festival but Monno made it worthwhile.

I headed out of Krakow for the day on Thursday and missed any afternoon discussions and what not so on arriving back in the city I made my way straight to St Katherine’s Church in the Jewish Quarter for the first music of Thursday. Tim Hecker and some duo called Wildbirds and Peacedrums were the pairing, with Hecker playing first from behind the church organ, above the alter. Dimming the lights to a mimimum, he played a 40minute piece of dense ambient which was well suited to the impressive surroundings. We were asked to stay seated for the whole performance as they said there would be no break between acts. While many stayed seated it only took about 5 minutes of Wildbirds… before the masses started exiting. No surprises really, as they were a god awful mess of Enya and Eurovision. I’ve no idea what they were doing at a festival that had a theme of Horror, bar to be the butt of jokes about how horrific they actually were. We stayed for most of it for some reason, and the addition of the Reykjavik Chamber Choir only made things worse.

As I mentioned the theme of the festival was Horror : The pleasure of fear and unease (to give it it’s full title), which was a fairly interesting concept (to me at least) and while it wasn’t too obvious going on the first couple of gigs they did a really good job of tying the concept into the music for most of the late Thursday night gig, in the Fabryk Night club, with a stellar line up featuring OneohtrixPointNever, Zombie, Zombie and Demdike Stare amongt others performing. OPN kicked things off with a fairly ramshackle though enjoyable live performance. Playing for less than hour I feel his performances would be more enjoyable if he played longer and let some of the tracks breath like he does on record instead of chopping and changing so much. The club itself was a pretty cool bare bones warehouse type place and when OPN finished they fired up 3 big screens, one on either side of the dancefloor and a bigger one behind the stage.

Next up were UK duo Jigoku who deejayed a pretty fun set of horror-esque sounds that got the place going off. The visuals were tied in brilliantly here, with each track getting its own accompanying montage from a horror film that was brilliant executed. There was one song especially, an amusingly histrionic metal track that went on for ages while shots of a barmy bollywood film featuring some sort of shiva character bombarded us from all corners. I’d love to know what the track was as it was one of the best moments of the week. They did outstay their welcome though and by the end when they were playing that rubbish Justice track that’s based around Goblin’s “Tenebre” (if ever there was a moment where you wonder “why don’t you just play the original!” it was there) which was a pretty silly nod to one of the headliners of the festival.

Demdike Stare, a collaboration between Modern Love’s Miles Whittaker and Finders Keepers Sean Canty, quickly brought the tempo back down with a spaced out set of spectral ambient which slowly morphed into deep dub techno managing to transcend the usual issues dub techno acts have (sounding like Maurizio knock offs) and giving us one of the highlights of the festival. Again the visuals played their part brilliant, matching the music’s creeping rhthyms and sparse atmospherics.

Parisians Zombie, Zombie started out their performance on shaky ground. Alan Howarth, who collaborated with John Carpenter on many of his soundtracks was to play along side them but they first let us know that they had never even practiced once together before the gig. The duo’s set was to be comprised solely of Carpenter covers and before Howarth joined them they kicked things off with a shuffling version of The End from Assualt on Precinct 13. They went straight into a blistering version of the Halloween theme when Howarth joined them, it only tempered by a major problem with the visuals which I think were coming from Howarth’s laptop. For some reason he couldn’t get the dvd to stay full screen and we were subjected to loads of Mac blue screen for the next couple of songs which was really jarring (considering the dominance of the screens in the venue) and it only served as a distraction as they played. Once they shut the laptop down it was far more enjoyable and considering they hadn’t played before Howarth (though quite low in the mix) did a pretty good job of keeping up with Zombie Zombie’s all-over-the shop style of performance. Music from Escape From New York and They Live also got an airing and by the end of they had looked into a pretty fantastic groove.

It was pretty late in the day when Zombie, Zombie finished, with the gig somehow now running 2hrs over time by that stage (the late start of performances was a fairly regular occurence over the week) and fatigue was starting to kick in but a few of us decided to hang around for a bit to check out Lindstroms set. I had caught him at Bloc earlier in the year and wasn’t impressed but he managed to be even more rubbish this time. You may wonder as well what he was doing at a horror themed festval, but to be fair to them, it was still a party after all and you need some name acts to pull the punters in. All I can say is at least Tiesto has a fancy light show to go along with his nonense as Lindstrom’s weak nu-disco sound resembed trance as much as anything else. A poor ending to what was an otherwise stellar club gig.

I’m gonna break this review into two cause there is still 3 days of gigs to write about and this post is already long enough. I’ll throw up the rest in the next day or two…