What was NOISE?: UNSOUND, wrapped
At UNSOUND 2024, a stacked lineup of far-flung artists gathered in Krakow to present their diverse interpretations of this year’s theme, NOISE.
Before Krakow’s annual UNSOUND festival kicked off on September 29, I sent its featured artists a deceptively simple question: “What the fuck is noise?” The query comes from an essay by Spanish sound artist and theorist Mattin, who ran one of the festival’s Noise Research Union workshops. UNSOUND organizer Mat Shulz used it to announce the festival’s 2024 theme, NOISE, and I, in turn, commandeered it for our survey.
I was thrilled with the responses we received from some of the most vital and venerated artists on UNSOUND’s roster. Chuquimamani-Condori, who released 2023’s most original album, called it “the cacophony of our first mother, the water called nowhere or mama cocha, the scream of our queer guardian, chuqi chinchay, emerging from the spring as wound or dehiscence, the first teaching.” Left-field folk legend Bill Callahan noted, more pragmatically, that “[n]oise is just two or more songs playing at the same time. It is efficient this way.”
Meanwhile, enigmatic noise god Keiji Haino shared the following: “I have become what is known as Noise. Other people want to be Noise. I would at least like Noise to be something that is overflowing from something. Just like [an] overflowing glass of water. I hate the word Noise to death.”
After attending the week-long festival, I’ve come to my own, still-half-baked conclusions about noise’s meaning: Noise is in the ear of the beholder. It lurks in unfamiliar corners, packed with the potential to revolutionize your mind. Whether it comes quietly, oozing softly into your unsuspecting brain, or jumps out and spits in your face, setting your cochlea ablaze, is of no real significance, as long as it alters even the smallest of your preconceived notions. For cynics — jaded patricians and haters of the avant garde alike — everything is noisy but nothing is noise; for the open minded, noise is everywhere.
Below, I’ve detailed the most creative interpretations of NOISE I saw at UNSOUND 2024.
Lasse Marhaug
A titan of Norwegian noise, Lasse Marhaug brought an intimidating modular rig to the bare-bones Teatr Łaźnia Nowa on September 30 (night two of the festival). He used it to terrorize the eardrums of the crowd with one of the most intense and exacting sets of the week.
Rafael Toral
Portuguese artist Rafael Toral performed his gorgeous new album Spectral Evolution in full during a “Morning Glory” session at the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology on October 1. He played with incredible grace, letting his tapestry of sounds leak in behind his casually brilliant guitar playing. Read our full review here.
Tarta Relena
Back at Łaźnia Nowa on October 2, polyglot Barcelona-based vocal duo Tarta Relena performed songs from their forthcoming album, És pregunta, over instrumentals that ranged from the sacred to the profane.
Mica Levi
No two Mica Levi releases sound the same. From their scrappy post-post-punk inventions with Good Bad Happy Sad (fka Micachu & The Shapes) to their wild catalog of collaborations — most recently a noisy guitar record with Alpha Maid — to her film scores, her portfolio is as varied as it gets. Following Tarta Relena, Sinfonietta Cracovia took the stage to perform a suite of Levi’s compositions — short and jagged, generally minimalist but often jarring, too. Levi only joined at the end of the concert, taking the under duress to bow.
Chuquimamani-Condori
E Crampton Chuquimia performed twice at UNSOUND — one DJ set and one live “intervention.” The former, which took place during the “opening night” party at Klub Poczta Główna on October 2, was a wild ride through the verdant landscapes of caporales, kullawada, and huayno — pre-Colombian styles of music and dance originated by the indigenous peoples of the Andes. Read our full review of that set here.
On October 3, the festival’s first official “club” night, they played live for a huge crowd at Kamienna 12, a cavernous warehouse at the edge of Krakow’s Warszawskie district, confabulated by the festival into two giant performance spaces and several other social areas. This set was much shorter but no less fruitful. During their 25 minutes on stage, they wielded a keytar and a keyboard synth, combining them to recreate songs from and adjacent to their transcendent 2023 album DJ E.
Antonina Nowacka (with Anna Pašić and Magdalena Gajdzica)
On October 3 at Kino Kijów, a massive movie theater just west of Krakow’s famed old town, Antonina Nowacka sang siren songs from her recent album, Sylphine Soporifera, accompanying herself on zither alongside Anna Pašić (harp) and Magdalena Gajdzica (flute). The music was eerily serene, like a silvery moon shining down on a dark forest.
Bill Callahan
For the most part, Bill Callahan has distanced himself stylistically from the noisy tricks he used to play in his younger, wilder days. The last few times I’ve seen him live, he’s played acoustic guitar, either unaccompanied or with very minimal accompaniment. Performing after Nowacka and Co. at Kino, though, he took the stage with an electric guitar and, later, an electrified harmonica, and proceeded to break the seated crowd’s collective brain with ear-splitting renditions of some of his most quiet, comforting folk songs: “In the Pines,” “Rock Bottom Riser,” “Pigeons,” “Coyotes,” “Bowevil,” et al. For a longtime fan, it was revitalizing to see a mythical figure revert to his roots and get silly with it.
Petronn Sphene
Leeds-based “no-wave rave” artist Petronn Sphene put on one of the wildest, most visceral performances I’ve seen in some time at Kamienna 12 near midnight on October 4. She thrashed back and forth behind the boards, her pink-and-blue hair flying in all directions as her bombed-out drums and heart-attack synths grew more and more extreme.
Kode9
Hyperdub founder Kode9 celebrated his album’s 20th anniversary with a two-decade-spanning set of hits and deep cuts after 2:30 a.m. the morning of October 4 at Kamienna 12. The crowd went particularly crazy (or I did, at least) when he dropped “Only One,” a profession of love from late footwork godfather DJ Rashad’s all-time album Double Cup.
Still House Plants
I’ve never understood the hype around Still House Plants. I’m still not sure I do, but watching them open a stacked three-part bill at Łaźnia Nowa on the afternoon of October 4 was an interesting experience. The way each performer is siloed off in their own world until they lock in for key, cathartic moments is clearer as it plays out on stage than it is on wax. Being there live to witness the fine line they toe between being a very good band and a very bad band helped me get a better understanding of what they’re all about, although I’m still a bit confused. What good is noise, though, if it doesn’t make you think?
The Body & Dis Fig
The Body are one of the heaviest bands in the world, which makes their capacity to collaborate with other artists across the hardcore spectrum all the more impressive. Following Still House Plants, they performed with Berlin-based screamer Dis Fig, turning things up about 50 notches as they tore through songs from their recent joint album, Orchards of a Futile Heaven.
Yellow Swans
Yellow Swans have constructed some of the most intricate colosses of sound ever built, and they brought their improvisatory approach to UNSOUND, closing the evening at Łaźnia Nowa with one of the most obliteratingly beautiful hours of music I’ve ever had the honor of hearing.
Lord Spikeheart
Martin Kanja is starting something special in Uganda, cultivating “the heaviest music from the Copntinent” on his brand new label, Haekalu Records. The Adept, his debut album as Lord Spikeheart, is a white-knuckled speed run that showcases his own incredibly heavy bona fides. It’s somehow even more aggressive than the vantablack project his former duo, Duma, released in 2020. At Kamienna 12’s second club night, he stirred the crowd into a frenzy, coaxing us into the only real mosh pit I saw all festival. I got knocked down twice!
DJ Anderson do Paraíso
I made the difficult decision to forgo evilgiane and Evian Christ’s b2b set to watch DJ Anderson do Paraíso, one of Brazil’s most forward-thinking baile funk producers. Hailing from Belo Horizonte, he’s an eight-hour drive from São Paulo — funk’s experimental epicenter — and he’s got his own thing going on; his work overlaps with, but is still separate from, that city’s mandelão scene. On his breakout album Queridão, he creates some of the hardest rhythms you’ll ever hear with very little traditional percussion, using negative space in its stead. At Kamienna 12, he catered to the dancing crowd, giving us more (recorded) boom-chot-chot beatboxing than I’d bargained for. Still, he managed to balance undeniable bangers with genuinely fascinating production, a feat that’s never easy to pull off.
Nídia & Valentina
Afro-Portuguese producer Nídia is one of the most exciting artists on the ever-interesting Príncipe label, and her latest effort — a joint album with explosive Italian percussionist Valentina Magaletti — does not disappoint. At Kamienna 12, the duo elaborated on tracks from Estradas in what was perhaps the tightest, grooviest set of the week.
Lankum
There’s no band mixing traditional Irish music with big-room drone like Lankum. I’ve never fully connected with their albums, but on October 5, watching each band member perform on separate risers on the stage of the gorgeous theater at ICE Krakow, their drummer draped in the flag of Palestine, was nothing short of inspiring. The best light show of the festival — along with the massiveness of their ballads and my partiality to the hurdy-gurdy — made their set one of my favorites.
Kali Malone
Drone queen Kali Malone entered the ICE stage halfway through her set. Her organ duet with her husband, Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, was preceded by vocal and brass quartets performing songs from her most recent record, All Life Long. Each of these were strange and lovely, and Malone would have done well to incorporate them more into her own segment of the set (the brass section pitched in to her and O’Malley’s organ work, but only minimally). Still, it’s always fascinating to watch two noise legends — especially ones connected by a force stronger than music — lock in.
Keiji Haino
Due to festival fatigue, an early flight, and the onset of a cold, my last set of UNSOUND 2024 was Keiji Haino at Kamienna 12, but this was probably the best possible note to go out on.
There’s no one in the world better at making noise than Haino who, at 72, has been doing it for half a century. He looks roughly the same as he did when he started, save for the few wrinkles and the silver hair he’s earned from releasing hundreds of albums and collaborating with all the best experimentalists of his heyday. He began his UNSOUND intervention on guitar, shredding merciless sheets of shrill static as I fumbled to pull my earplugs out of their keychain case. He then slid left to a table that held three domed, motion-sensor synths, hovering over them like a wizard casting a wicked spell. Finally, he moved to the microphone, howling so hard it strained the prodigious PA system. He ended on a poem thanking the crowd in broken English, a touching end to the wildest show I’ve ever seen.