The second batch of names for Unsound Kraków are here, as well as the music program schedule, taking place from 7 to 12 October. Individual tickets and 3-day Unsound Club Passes are also now available, through Resident Advisor. For the first time, we’re offering a student price for the Unsound Club Passes at 290 PLN, for more than 35 performances, while the regular Club Pass remains the same price as last year at 350 PLN. Note that there are a limited number of passes and tickets available – so be quick. We’d also like to highlight the fact that Unsound has a new late-night venue, the Henryk Reyman Municipal Football Stadium, known as Wisła Stadium.Two rooms – adapted into a temporary club – will be located inside the building, with an outdoor covered seating area serving as a chillout zone overlooking the football field. Finally, remember that Unsound’s 2025 theme is WEB, encompassing a trio of festivals in Kraków, Osaka and New York. 

No less than three projects involve Sinfonietta Cracovia at this year’s Unsound, each exploring a different approach to the web of string musicians on stage. In addition to their already announced collaboration with Wojciech Rusin and Harry Górski-Brown, Unsound teams up with the legendary Warp label and Carhartt WIP to present The Providenza Ensemble. Three electronic-centered artists – Kelman Duran, Loraine James and Puce Mary – will embark on a week-long residency at Providenza, Corsica, with Rakhi Singh to work on music for orchestra, before a premiere with Sinfonietta Cracovia at Unsound. The Kraków ensemble will also work with Canadian composer Kara-Lis Coverdale, who will present a combination of pieces for strings, as well as works for piano included on her upcoming album A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever. 

Two projects combine music and poetry. Blending chants and brass harmonies, Egyptian artist and poet Abdullah Miniawy will showcase his bold, operatic album Peacock dreams أَحْلَامُ الطَّاوُوسِ as a trio, joined by trombone players Jules Boittin and Robinson Khoury. Polish experimental musician Aleksandra Słyż and SIKSA’s Alex Freiheit bring a new iteration of their collaborative project GHSTING – set in a sinister Eastern European hotel and mixing concert, theatre and spoken word –  joined by dancers Pola Nikiel and Katarzyna Sikora.

The Unsound program for the lecture hall in the 19th century medical academy at ul. Kopernika 15 is the biggest yet. Free Morning Glory concerts include Nina Garcia, Rai Tateishi, and now Indonesian musician Johannes “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi – half of Raja Kirik – who joins forces with Krakow pianist Martyna Zakrzewska to present Transmutation Sound, a work centered around a self-built instrument. Afternoon Glory shows on Friday and Saturday include Scottish smallpipes bagpipe player and experimentalist Brìghde Chaimbeul, as well as the previously announced Tashi Dorji – due to limited capacity, these shows require an extra ticket on top of the festival pass. Purchase here.

Live shows also populate the late-night club program, including Miami’s Nick León, who will present his excellent album A Tropical Entropy; New York trio Purelink, following two acclaimed albums with a contemporary spin on Y2K ambient dub; the return of The Bug, this time featuring Jamaican dancehall and reggae legend Warrior Queen; Robert Piotrowicz, with the premiere of his new album Wrong Filament; Piernikowski / Sienkiewicz presents MAGMA, which sees the Godfather of Polish techno, Jacek Sienkiewicz, team up with producer Piernikowski; Krenz, who will be joined by rapper Karuzelkaaa (half of TONFA), presenting his new album Polski Sklep; and experimental percussionist Tymek Papior.

As for DJ sets, Unsound will host the premiere of several back-to-backs, including French producer Simo Cell and Belgian-born Nono Gigsta; gqom pioneer DJ Lag and Poland-based Kenyan experimentalist Slikback; and Warsaw’s Hermeneia with Dutch DJ mad miran; previously announced b2b sets unite Assyouti and OKO DJ as well as dBridge and gyrofield. Solo sets come from Bobby Beethoven (fka Total Freedom), returning to Unsound after more than a decade, and Introspekt, who is at the forefront of a new wave of bass music, fresh off the release of her debut album Moving the Center. And anyone who has seen Colombian producer Bclip’s Boiler Room knows that he will light room 2 on fire. There will also be DJ sets from Warsaw DJ, producer, and 00effort founder k:i:o:s:k and Łódź-based deconstructbreakbeat producer Bambi Uzi.

Of course we’re also continuing the Unsound tradition of interventions at our club nights, shows designed to fracture conventional programming. In addition to the previously announced Evicshen, there will be interventions from Indonesian primal-core band Kuntari and from Swedish experimental trombonist Maria Bertel.

Connecting the music and discourse program is the new duo Radical Democracy – made up of James Hoff and Ben Kudler – who hack security cameras around the world live to create an A/V performance reimagining GPS and surveillance technologies outside their military, industrial, and domestic applications. The show will be followed by a talk, and takes place in Hevre, alongside Julek Ploski and Kat Zavada’s The Omega Secret Society, exploring conspiracy theories.

New additions to the discourse program also include sociologist Akwugo Emejulu, who will present a talk drawing from Fugitive Feminism – a personal and politically uncompromising essay that embraces the inhuman as a space for care, feminism, and solidarity. She will also be joined in discussion by Hannah Proctor, author of Burnout, a reflection on the emotional aftermath of political engagement. Proctor will also lead a workshop for activists on sustaining collective energy. Experts on online cultures Aleksandra Herzyk, co-author of Przegryw (which translates as Loser), and Pitchfork’s Kieran Press-Reynolds meet for a conversation on the online mutations of the global far-right, exploring whether the Polish manosphere follows Western trends or its own distinct trajectory. 

After a thrilling show with his “industrial smut” trio Concentration at last year’s Unsound, legal researcher and musician Zachary Cooper will address how generative AI has thrown global copyright frameworks into disarray. Writer and critic Liam Inscoe-Jones will present Songs in the Key of MP3, exploring artists who have redefined music and identity in a fast-moving, ephemeral era centred around the internet. Composer Jonathan Bepler will join Unsound regular Andy Battaglia for a conversation following the screening of River of Fundament, which Bepler created with Matthew Barney; together they will attempt to unravel this epic, baffling work. 

We’ll make a third and final Unsound Kraków announcement in the middle of September, adding a few more names to the late-night club events, opening and closing parties, and finalising the expansive discourse program. Also, keep your eyes peeled for a second Unsound Osaka announcement, as well as the Unsound New York announcement – all part of the Unsound WEB.

First announcement

Special projects at Unsound 2025 include River of Fundament, the operatic experimental film by American artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler. Tracing the seven states of incarnation from death to rebirth, this six-hour film made in 2014 will be presented, for the first time ever, with layers of live scoring by Bepler featuring improvisational percussionist Adam Gołębiewski and other Polish musicians to be announced. Tickets for this event go on sale soon.

Commissioned projects will build webs across borders, including Polish producer 2K88 joining forces with rising UK artists Lauren Duffus, Bianca Scout and Rainy Miller. Japanese sound artist FUJI|||||||||||TA and American experimentalist Ka Baird perform together at Unsound Kraków and Osaka for the first time, as will legendary footwork producer RP Boo with Polish drummer Gary Gwadera. For a piece titled Drift, Scottish bagpipe player Harry Górski-Brown and Polish composer Wojciech Rusin will refine and expand their recent Ephemera show in Warsaw, to include strings from Sinfonietta Cracovia.

Unsound: WEB will also present numerous pioneers, tracing their influence on today’s music, such as Jim O’Rourke – since the early ’90s a leading force in everything from indie rock to drone to noise – who teams up with Japan’s Eiko Ishibashi. Suzanne Ciani and Actress will present their new collaborative show titled Concrète Waves. Vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara will weave interlaced vocals, while A Guy Called Gerald celebrates 30 years of his groundbreaking album Black Secret Technology. Cult US rapper billy woods, meanwhile, shepherds us through the past, present and future of underground hip-hop.

Bands feature prominently this year, including those with acclaimed new releases: UK 8-piece caroline with caroline 2; American experimental rock outlet YHWH Nailgun with 45 Pounds; Norway’s Smerz with their Big City Life; and Moin – the fruitful collaboration of Valentina Magaletti and Raime (longtime Unsound attendees may remember they played their first-ever show together at Unsound, and Raime’s live debut was also at the festival – way back in 2010).

While Unsound’s 2024 NOISE edition was heavy on drums, WEB will highlight solo guitar, and include: Nina Garcia, with her tonal and textural experiments; the minimalist work of Polish metal guitarist Artur Rumiński; and Bhutanese improviser Tashi Dorji whose performances teeter between “chaos and control, terror and beauty” (Pitchfork). Meanwhile, Japanese musician Rai Tateishi transcends the limits of ancient traditional flutes with live processing from fellow-goat(jp) member Koshiro Hino, while noise artist and instrument maker Evicshen makes radical physical electroacoustic music.

Over Unsound’s history in Kraków, as the city has gentrified, the festival has been forced to relocate from one adapted space to another in search of late-night venues. In 2025, we thought we’d finally run out of options, but after months of searching we have a new home within the Henryk Reyman Municipal Stadium, of all places, where we’ll bring in a soundsystem, lighting and set to create a temporary multi-room club. The program will include live shows, experimental interventions, and as always an array of club music from around the globe.

The first of many names is Angolan producer Nazar, who recently released the album Demilitarize on Hyperdub. Franco/Guadeloupean artist Mooki6 teams up with Senegalese/Hispanic DJ and producer B4MBA to form the industrial dancehall and jungle project Nexus. Forms of experimental pop that trace the past into the future come from deadpan yet danceable Estonian/US “performance project” NEW YORK, as well as London duo Tracey, who blend warped R&B, hyperpop, trip-hop and chamber pop. Further sets come from Glasgow-based KAVARI, Kraków’s Paszka and Egyptian producer Itfll, who will present a live show ahead of the release of his EP on Zuli’s influential irsh label.

As for DJ sets, Unsound continues its tradition of booking exciting back-to-backs. Legendary drum & bass producer dBridge will pair with the iconoclastic new-gen club alchemist gyrofield for the first time, and Egyptian DJ and beatmaker Assyouti will connect with OKO DJ, a French artist unafraid of blending nu-metal, gabber and noise with more approachable dance music. Solo DJ sets come from New Jersey-born DJ Haram; Djrum, who dissects and rebuilds club music on his 4 deck set-up; Australian DJ Kia, who's been garnering well-deserved attention after a slew of high-quality mixes; and Yvu, a Brazilian artist and founder of the Acta label.

Unsound’s daytime discourse program will untangle connections between culture, technological systems, geopolitics and sonic economies. Liz Pelly joins the lineup to present Mood Machine, her new book on how Spotify and platform capitalism has reshaped our relationships with music. Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein – author of The Palestine Laboratory – and Polish-Palestinian reporter Ala Qandil will trace a global web of complicity woven through Israel’s export and import of surveillance technology and weapons – tools honed on Palestinians in the genocide in Gaza. Multimedia artist and writer Steven Warwick (aka Heatsick) will present a talk and lead a two-day workshop based on Notes on Evil, his book exploring how the idea of “evil” is constructed across culture, politics, and media.

Researcher and artist Martina Raponi will premiere her forthcoming book Psofotopias. Noise: Sounding Out the Unheard, a speculative theory of sonic perception touching on deaf sound art practices, algorithmic music recommendation, dreams, and paranoid listening. She’ll be joined in conversation by researcher and media theorist Florian Cramer. Jeremy D. Larson – music critic and Deputy Director at Pitchfork – will present (Dis)Influence, a lecture on how media and social platforms turn taste into a set of micro-economies where preference is packaged and sold. Artist and composer Julek Płoski will team up with digital culture researcher and artist Kat Zavada to create Omega Secret Society, a speculative, semi-live, hyper-paranoid mockumentary event combining music, essayistic performance and glitchy cinema.

Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals to the Unsound open call, this year dedicated to the discourse program. You will hear from us this month, and those selected will be included in our next announcement.

Unsound WEB includes Unsound Osaka from 5th to 7th September – the first artist announcement and tickets go on sale at the start of July. The Unsound New York announcement follows soon after. Remember that we also have Unsound Adelaide coming next month, on July 11th and 12th. Stay tuned for more info.

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LINEUP SO FAR:

2K88 + Bianca Scout + Lauren Duffus + Rainy Miller (PL/UK) / A Guy Called Gerald presents Black Secret Technology (UK) / Abdullah Miniawy (EG) / Actress & Suzanne Ciani present Concrète Waves (UK/US) / Aleksandra Słyż & Alex Freiheit present GHSTING (PL) / Artur Rumiński (PL) / Assyouti b2b OKO DJ (EG/FR) / Bambi Uzi (PL) / Bclip (CO) / billy woods (US) / Bobby Beethoven (fka Total Freedom) (US) / Brìghde Chaimbeul (UK) / caroline (UK) / dBridge b2b gyrofield (UK/HK) / DJ Haram (US) / DJ Lag b2b Slikback (ZA/KE) / Djrum (UK) / Evicshen (US) / FUJI|||||||||||TA & Ka Baird present Where Does Fire End? (JP/US) / Harry Górski-Brown & Wojciech Rusin present Drift with Sinfonietta Cracovia (UK/PL) / Hermeneia b2b mad miran (PL/NL) / Introspekt (US) / Radical Democracy (James Hoff & Ben Kudler) (US) / Piernikowski / Sienkiewicz present MAGMA (PL) / Jim O’Rourke & Eiko Ishibashi (US/JP) / Joan La Barbara (US) / Julek Ploski & Kat Zavada's Omega Secret Society (PL) / k:i:o:s:k (PL) / Kara-Lis Coverdale & Sinfonietta Cracovia (CA/PL) / KAVARI (UK) / Kia (AU) / Krenz feat. Karuzelkaaa (PL) / Kuntari (ID) / ltfll (EG) / Maria Bertel (SE) / Martyna Zakrzewska & J. “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi present Transmutation Sound (PL/ID) / Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s River of Fundament with live scoring by Bepler feat. Adam Gołębiewski (US/PL) / Moin (UK) / Nazar (AO/NL) / NEW YORK (EE/US) / Nexus (B4MBA & Mooki6) (ES/SN/FR/GP) / Nick León - live (US) / Nina Garcia (FR) / Paszka (PL) / Purelink (US) / Rai Tateishi (JP) / Robert Piotrowicz presents Wrong Filament (PL) / RP Boo & Gary Gwadera (US/PL) / Simo Cell b2b Nono Gigsta (FR/BE/DE) / Smerz (NO) / Tashi Dorji (BT) / The Bug & Warrior Queen (UK/JM) / Tracey (UK) / Tymek Papior (PL) / Warp presents: The Providenza Ensemble (Kelman Duran, Loraine James & Puce Mary) with Sinfonietta Cracovia (DO/UK/DK/PL) / YHWH Nailgun (US) / Yvu (BR) + More TBA

Source: press release