Raphael Rogiński’s "Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes" Reissued. Unsound Kraków Starts This Sunday
An overview of Unsound Kraków 2024 by festival Artistic Director Mat Schulz
Introduction
From the outside, Unsound possibly looks like a massive operation, but people are usually surprised when they enter our office. It’s, uh, “cosy”. Our team is small, and I have no idea how we do what we do. Unsound Kraków starts this Sunday, Unsound New York in November, Unsound at the Barbican in London in January. And, meanwhile, we’re putting out albums – including today’s reissue of Raphael Rogiński’s Plays Coltrane and Langston Hughes – read about it below.
Regarding Unsound Kraków, the schedule for the music and discourse program events is now up on our website, but you can also download the Unsound app ( iOS / Android) as well as the festival booklet in PDF form.
For this edition of the Unsound Dispatch (fka the Unsound newsletter) I’ve put together an overview of Unsound 2024, making thematic groupings as a way of coming at the festival from different angles. It’s not intended to be exhaustive, but rather give a taste of the music and ideas behind the programming.
Hope to see you soon!
Mat Schulz, Unsound Artistic Director
Unsound Releases Raphael Rogiński’s Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes
We’d long planned to release two Rogiński albums this year. The first was Žaltys, the Unsound-commissioned album of compositions inspired by the music and landscapes of the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands. The second is a reissue of Rogiński’s 2015 album Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes, to my mind one of the best Polish albums of the last decade, long out of print on CD, only available via a random upload on Youtube.
The album Plays Coltrane and Langston Hughes is now available as a 180gr. gatefold double LP. Remastered by Joe Talia, the reissue is based around Rogiński’s solo-guitar reimaginings of Coltrane compositions—radically slowed, extracting polyphonic tensions, and striving for an intimacy and mysticism that transcend genre. The album also includes two original compositions that draw on poems by Langston Hughes, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s.
The expanded reissue adds four new tracks recorded in Warsaw in the summer of 2024, a decade after the original recordings, yet reaching back to the concept of reinterpreting the work of Coltrane. As always, the playing is dazzling, solo without overdubs. The idea for the new tracks—recorded after a marathon stretch of 52 concerts in three months—came from Rogiński himself; one suspects that he could play and reinterpret this music endlessly. As Boomkat writes, “it's basically a full EP's worth of fresh music… he manages to extend the concept (and its philosophy) harmonizing with the preceding suite while showing off the kind of textural qualities that made summer's Žaltys so special. 'Promise' is particularly heartwarming.”
The three paintings on the cover are by Kraków artist Marcin Janusz, taken from a larger work entitled Kalendarz, courtesy of LETO Gallery. One of his paintings also adorns the cover of Žaltys. If you want a set of both albums, then you can purchase them at a discounted price on our Unsound Bandcamp page.
Rogiński will officially launch the album with a concert at Unsound on Sunday 6 October at the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, featuring special guest Amirtha Kidambi of the band Elder Ones. In mid-November he will perform the music at the Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center in New York, with Kidambi and drummer Jim White. Rogiński will perform music from Žaltys at the Barbican in London on 17 January, at an Unsound-curated event.
Unsound 2024: A Summary in Five Brief Sections
One: Morning Glory
Anyone who has attended Unsound Kraków for an entire week knows that one of the most memorable parts of the festival is the Morning Glory series. Free of charge, shows start at 11am throughout the week, to reset your ears after the night before (and clear the mind before attending our daily discourse program). As in recent years, Morning Glory takes place in the steep, circular lecture theatre of a 19th-century medical university (except for Tuesday, in Manggha, the Museum of Japanese Art and Technology). Shows are timed so that about halfway through, light falls through the expansive windows at the back to land upon the performers, underlining the fact that the best light (and A/V) shows are provided free of charge by the universe. This is how it looked when Martyna Basta was playing:
This year the Morning Glory series includes Japanese artist FUJI||||||||||TA and Rafael Toral, as well as a couple of new collaborations. One of them unites Kraków saxophonist and composer Marek Pospiszalski with Julian Sartorius, an abundantly creative percussionist. Sartorius' Hidden Tracks series involves him hiking thousands of kilometres with a pair of drumsticks, playing on road signs, buildings, moss, mushrooms, even streams, capturing the way soundscapes change. The releases even come with a hiking map.
Another collaboration sees the return of Ukrainian modular synth musician Heinali, who was last at the festival performing with a tap dancer at 2am on a club night. This time he’ll perform with Ukrainian singer Yaisha, with the premiere of a new work called Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), bringing the music of 12th century abbess, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen into a new era. Here’s a picture of them at the Abbaye de Sylvanès in France, taken during their GMEA residency working on this project:
Songs
Unsound is known as an experimental music festival, which might conjure up images of somber audiences dressed in black staring intently at the stage and listening to demanding music. Partly true. But Unsound has always been far more diverse musically than that – our first-ever night in 2003 included the hardcore band Black Eyes.
I’ve long wanted to make “Songs” an Unsound theme. Until that happens, this year we have a very strong – and varied – representation of the songwriting form. There’s Bill Callahan, who will perform a solo set at Unsound, as well as engage in a live artist talk with music writer Philip Sherburne. Then there’s Lankum, with their dark take on Irish folk forms, and ML Buch, who blends electronics, reverb-drenched guitar and vocals into a subline whole. Are Still House Plants a song-based band? Are The Body & Dis Fig? Bianca Scout? It’s here that things get blurry and more typically Unsound, muddying the waters between form, between genre.
Noise, Noise, Noise
When we announced our Noise theme I received lots of emails. Some of them were written by the aforementioned figures dressed in black who listen to – and make – demanding music. It’s time, they told me, that you finally booked [INSERT NOISE MUSICIAN] and [INSERT NOISE ACT]. But I wonder, how many actual noise shows would make sense at Unsound? And is the form that radical anymore?
The very first show we booked this year was Marco Fusinato’s DESASTRES – something we’ve been trying to bring over since he presented the work for 200 days straight, playing 8 hours a day, at the Venice Biennale. The show involves Marco performing a durational noise guitar set, which triggers a multitude of images on a massive screen. He will perform at Kino Kjów, between 12:00 midday and 3.30pm on Saturday 5 October. You can dip in and out, and you might be in the cinema with a crowd – or alone – that’s the idea. Here’s a clip of Marco playing recently at Melbourne’s Now or Never festival:
Considering how long the genre has been around, a noise set is only as radical as its context. It’s why we decided to place Keiji Haino in the early hours of the morning at a club night, as an intervention. It creates a different energy and audience response. Other interventions of this kind on the club nights will come from Daniel Szwed, and even Chuquimamani-Condori – but don’t expect a literal interpretation of noise from them.
As for classics of the noise scene, the recently reunited Yellow Swans will play their first European show since Sónar in 2008, Norwegian Lasse Marhaug will play around the release of a new album, and U.S. artist Ash Fure will present Animal, which explores physicality and high volume.
There’s the band MOPCUT, bela with Noise & Cries, DJ /rupture (who's sure to reference the festival theme in his set), Petronn Sphene, Bassvictim, and more – but there’s also a great deal of music and shows that explore silence, as the other of noise. It’s not random, for example, that field recordists Chris Watson and Izabela Dłużyk will present their commissioned work Białowieża at the start of the nighttime program, capturing the sounds of Europe’s last primaeval forest. Bill Callahan plays a stripped back solo set. And let’s not forget Kali Malone with All Life Long for organ, brass and choir, playing before Lankum – where noise rubs up against those traditional song forms.
The daytime discourse program will also investigate noise at length, considering it in relation to politics, culture, technology, and more. This program is so expansive that it would require another edition of the Unsound Dispatch to encapsulate it. In the near future, we hope to post some essays here by participants. Again, check the program on our website, app or booklet PDF.
A Remembrance of Festivals Past
Unsound partly built its reputation on exploring architecture and adapted spaces. This curatorial approach or model becomes more challenging in Kraków due to gentrification, inflation, and the difficulty of securing venues we have worked with for years, not to mention the fact we were kicked out of churches, accused of being satanists. (9 years on from this absurd situation, and they still won’t allow us back – we tried.)
Our most iconic venue, inexorably entwined with the festival’s identity, was Hotel Forum – a space we can no longer use. Thankfully, 5 years on, most people have stopped talking about it, or at least stopped talking with me about it. As one of a thousand memories, here’s Marcus Schmickler performing there in the middle of a club night:
Since the pandemic, our club events have taken place in the post-industrial buildings at Kamienna.
This year, on Sunday 29 September, I’m going to lead a soundwalk called A Remembrance of Festivals Past, exploring the changes in the city that have occurred since 2003, at a time when Kraków was undergoing rapid transformation. Now, impacted by development, Kraków is very different – and thus so is Unsound. The walk will be focused on active listening to one’s surroundings, including demolished factories upon which building developments now stand, Hotel Forum and the 15th-century church from which we were evicted. The aim is to hear the ghosts of the past in the noise of the present – and to contemplate the future of both Unsound and Kraków. And, in a way, as we walk through these spaces, listening, we’ll also be ghosts, haunting the places we used to inhabit with the festival.
In respect to ghosts of the past, and noise, take a listen to a recording of the first show we ever did at St Catherine’s Church in 2008: Ben Frost. Someone recorded it in the audience, sent the file in, and the audio became the first ever Unsound Podcast. I remember that show clearly. Ben hooded behind his laptop, cradling a low-slung guitar. There were two massive chandeliers spinning from the vaulted ceilings, pushed by sound vibrations, and I felt the very walls of the structure might collapse.
Saturday Afternoon shows at ICE Theatre
Saturday 5 October is a massive day at Unsound this year. There’s a Polish label fair starting at midday, then the aforementioned DESASTRES show by Marco Fusinato, and then, in the mid-afternoon, three brilliant shows in the theatre at ICE. One of the great things about Kraków as a festival city is that you can walk between venues, and this is all perfectly doable.
Piotr Kurek is a national treasure. Take a listen to the Unsound-released Smartwoods here:
Piotr has a niche but very dedicated following around the world, but I hope the new project he will present at Unsound has the capacity to make that audience bigger Playing with a band, the music references early Air and Tortoise, computer music, yet sounds decidedly like Piotr Kurek, blurring the organic and synthetic in a very contemporary way. Note that Piotr will also perform at Unsound New York in November, at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.
Following, Ka Baird will present a show based on her album Soundtracks From the Bardos, featuring Henry Fraser on bass (who just released the hypnotic Breath Line), Wrocław-based trumpet player and composer Artur Majewski and Kraków violinist Paulina Woś. Check out a portrait of Ka here:
To end, the previously-mentioned Ash Fure will present Animal, an interactive sound art installation and live musical performance that combines sonic, visual and physical elements into something very unique.
There are no real “headliners” on this bill, but I’m sure it’s going to be one of the best groupings of live music in the festival.
There are so many more shows I could write about, but this would end up being a book, so I will stop there!
See you soon in Kraków!
