Unsound might be a celebration of underground music, but from the moment you enter its primary venue, Adelaide’s Dom Polski Centre, the festival couldn’t feel more globally relevant. In the courtyard of the Polish cultural centre is a large concrete memorial to the over 20,000 Polish soldiers who lost their lives, following the Soviet Union’s invasion of the country in 1939, in what are known as the Katyn massacres. “Za naszą i waszą wolność / For our freedom and yours,” reads the memorial.
Inside the venue is Unsound’s first act, the Ukrainian composer Heinali, who came to attention live-streaming from a bomb shelter in the Ukrainian city of Lviv as Russian artillery rained down from above. It’s sobering, thinking about bartenders at the Dom Polski Centre busy pouring Wyborowa vodka and Żywiec beer to the collected festival beatniks, people whose families may very well have been displaced during World War II, and the connection through time to Heinali, whose gorgeous synthesiser compositions symbolise a graceful resistance to the tyranny of empire.
Unsound was founded in Krakow, Poland in 2003 and now has several smaller satellite events around the world, including in Adelaide, which this year celebrates its 10th iteration. Now packaged in the Illuminate Adelaide program of public, city-wide light and sound installations, Unsound provides some much needed grit to a family-friendly event. It swings from political statements to raw emotion, abstract electronics to explosive celebration.
On night one, Heinali’s electronic protest finishes and the audience is transported to the fantasy realm of the Danish ambient musician Sofie Birch and Polish vocalist and composer Antonina Nowacka. Taking the form of pointy-eared sylphs in shimmering white gowns, the pair sing wordless melodies, tinkle strings of metal chimes and blow on ocarinas. It’s a vision of a European mythological utopia: a continent without despots, wars and invasions; a place where there’s nothing to do but frolic in long grasses and fall asleep to the gentle flutter of fairy wings.
Soon though, the audience is propelled into the present by Robin Fox’s full-body bass and laser performance of his recent work Triptych. It’s the first taste of Unsound’s soundsystem, which feels powerful enough to rearrange internal organs; the first depth charge of sub-bass notes compels surprised gasps and weakened knees in the audience.
At this point in his career Fox is primarily engaged in large-scale public sound and laser installations but is at heart still a DIY punk who likes glitches and lasers. On stage, Fox is in control, his sound and light compositions streaming across the room’s light fittings and architecture. Lasers refract into rainbow splashes where they connect with the walls and slice into the thick slabs of bass busy making one’s eyeballs vibrate. Fox’s performance is the equivalent of seeing a major pop star condense their stadium show into your local band room.
The night’s headliner Kode9 opens with some vague sci-fi pronouncements before the onscreen visuals take the audience into a radioactive lava-hued landscape. There are missile launches, violently descending parachutes and scorched earth sonics. The wastelands give way to more organic forms and wormhole-like imagery, suggesting the way forward for both the planet and humanity is for us to leave earth entirely.
Things escalate into borderline mania with the night’s closing act, DJ Diaki, who was called in as a last-minute replacement for the American rapper bbymutha. Hailing from Mali, DJ Diaki plays a form of regional dance music known as Bolani Show that repurposes traditional instruments such as the large xylophone-like balafon into unrelenting 170bpm bangers. The audience barely keeps up, with Diaki desperately calling on the crowd to “please dance faster!”
NME’s Saturday night begins with the emotional post-rock cello experiments of Uruguay’s Mabe Frati, who along with her supporting guitar player lock into Battles-esque math rock with looks of unadulterated joy on their faces. Sitting under a green-gold spotlight, Frati’s naturally soaring voice gives way to doom-laden guitar squalls and dissonant bowed cello. The audience is in raptures, the band left beaming. Manchester two-piece Space Africa, meanwhile, return us to the dankest of sub frequencies with a political audio-visual presentation of grainy surveillance footage of hooded young Black men (seemingly minding their own business, it’s worth noting), sidewalk car crashes and references to the 1996 Arndale bombing carried out by the IRA.
Unsound Club, the main show’s afterparty at nearby basement bar The Lab, was a bust on Friday, the subpar sound leaving US experimental house producer Huerco S. poorly served. After the lacklustre showing, Kode9 requested more powerful subs be installed, he tells NME. It works: Unsound Club finally comes alive on Saturday night, Naarm’s DJ Plead marshaling the crowd with a flawless set of percussive house and techno and Tayhana from Argentina taking the audience on a high BPM odyssey of South American rhythm. Kode9 returns for a surprisingly upbeat set that largely avoids the foundational dubstep the Hyperdub label boss is famed for pioneering.
Closing out the proceedings on Sunday is Unsound’s headliner, Oneohtrix Point Never aka Daniel Lopatin, the resolutely avant-garde synthesist who also happens to be a key collaborator of the world’s biggest popstar Abel Tesfaye, formerly The Weeknd. Lopatin’s set moves from field recordings to glacially immense towers of electronic sound, around the top of which coalesce synthetic thunderstorms of cloud computing.
At one point flashes of a cartoon donkey’s tormented muzzle emerge from a wormhole as Lopatin produces demented screeching sounds on a bowed instrument, giving Orwell’s Animal Farm for the age of battery-hen agriculture. Lopatin’s a master at gleefully dislocating, dismembering and reforming pop-culture into his own awe-inspiring constructions.
Illuminate Adelaide’s main program might feel thematically thin in comparison to Unsound’s buffet of outsider visions, but it’s clearly beloved by vast numbers of people who don’t usually engage with the world’s dark clubs and experimental subcultures. To some people, many of the artists at Unsound might feel like niche concerns, but the inclusion of Oneohtrix Point Never is a reminder that this is where it starts: how the weird and wonderful sounds of the underground eventually filter into the mainstream. That a mass-market event like Illuminate Adelaide keeps that feedback loop going, funding a program with profits that likely pale in comparison to its major offering is a credit to it and key to its ongoing relevance. Unsound might just be Australia’s best under-the-radar music festival – a decade into its existence and its 10th anniversary was almost faultless.
NME travelled to Unsound Festival as a guest of Illuminate Adelaide, which continues til July 30