Unsound festival

Unsound Festival is an annual music festival that takes place in Kraków, Poland, dealing with evolving and mutating forms of music, as well as related visual arts. Apart from the main festival, Unsound regularly takes place in cities around the world such as New York, London, Adelaide, Toronto, and Minsk. Editions of the festival have also occurred in Tbilisi, Prague and Bratislava.

The Kraków festival is run by the non profit organisation Fundacja Tone Muzyka i Nowe Formy Sztuki (Tone Foundation for Music and New Forms of Art).

The first Unsound festival in Kraków, Poland took place in 2003, starting out as a local, underground event in the city's cellar bars. It currently falls towards the end of October and lasts around one week. Starting out as an event focused on Polish audiences, in recent years it has rapidly developed to become one of the most prominent events of its kind in Europe.

In 2010, the festival developed its program and visual identity around the theme "Horror, the pleasure of fear and unease", which explored the history and emerging trend of darkness in music. "Horror" was followed up in 2011 with the theme "Future Shock," inspired by the 1970 book by futurist Alvin Toffler. Subsequent themes have included "The End" (2012), "Interference" (2013) and "The Dream" (2014). The theme for 2015 has been announced as "Surprise", described in a press release that was heavily redacted and intentionally revealed little.

In February 2010, Unsound cooperated with local partners in New York such as the Wordless Music series, Bunker and Electronic Music Foundation to create a 10-day satellite event involving music, film, workshops and panel discussions. Unsound has now produced four New York editions in total.

Unsound has also worked on projects in other countries, with four events in Adelaide within the framework of the Adelaide Arts Festival, an event in London partnering with The Barbican and BFI among others, and Unsound Toronto as part of Luminato. Unsound has also worked in the region of Eastern Europe, in particular Minsk, Belarus, to create mini-festivals with local partners.

Unsound is also known for opening up architectural spaces, adapting them for music events. In Kraków, this includes Hotel Forum, a communist-era hotel building that had lain empty for a decade until Unsound 2012, then subsequently became an important cultural hub in the city. In Toronto in June 2015, Unsound adapted the abandoned Hearn Power Station to produce the first ever public event in the space in collaboration with Luminato Festival.

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Wikipedia