Krakow’s Unsound Festival Profiled

Source: Pitchfork.

Unsound goes out of its way to tug attendees gently out of their everyday contexts. Even locals would have been surprised when, last year, the Chicago jazz cornetist Rob Mazurek climbed the steps of the main square’s bell tower and followed the resident bugler’s traditional hourly trumpet call with a minute of free improvisation. And Unsound’s organizers seem well aware that the experience of the festival may be even more important than the music itself. For a few years, they banned photography, in the effort to counteract social media’s steady pull at the edges of patrons’ attention. (Last year, they rescinded the photo ban, yet phones mostly stayed pocketed—suggesting that, miraculously, the attempt at behavioral therapy actually worked.) And in 2015, they took the unusual step of leaving a sizable portion of the lineup unannounced; attendees wouldn’t learn who some headliners were until the moment the artists took the stage.