Playground magazine

The Unsound festival is turning 10 this year, and the organisation chose to celebrate it with an, at first sight, chilling theme: The End. Is this the last one? We doubt it very much: over the years, Unsound has consolidated itself as one of the most visionary experimental music events, specialising in the connection between electronica and classical music, avant-garde dance music and the frictions between noise and calm. It's not a dance festival, nor a gathering of the underground minorities, but an event that offers a dialogue between the different disciplines, and gives a very complete idea of the state of cutting edge music at this very moment. Give or take some obvious differences (because they're not the same kind of festival, neither structurally or in mentality), Unsound is, with Sónar, the most important experimental music event of the year in Europe.

In fact, The End has to do with all the ideas that have been going around for months about the hypothetical end of the world in 2012, which offers many options. Unsound starts this Saturday, 13th October, and will unfold its apocalyptic program for a full week, until the 21st. The festival takes over the city of Krakow (the most tourist-friendly and beautiful of Poland), and divides its activities over different spaces located in the Jewish neighbourhood, the historical centre and the banks of the river Vístula. Events take place in cinemas, galleries, churches adapted for a concert audience, museums and, as the stellar stage of this tenth edition, the Hotel Forum, an abandoned building on the west bank of the river, reminiscent of the hotel in “The Shining”; the latter will be the stage for the DJ sets and nocturnal dance concerts.

Over the past weeks, we've been bringing you Unsound-related news and content, including podcasts (MikeQ and Ron Morelli; and tomorrow, we'll have one by Metasplice that will freeze your blood) and line-up previews. Now the moment has come to go over the exceptional bill and advise you to, if you're around and have the time, get on a plane to Katowice, take the bus to Krakow and enjoy the event's breath-taking line-up. Here are nine recommendations for nine days.

Unsound always starts smoothly. On Saturday, the first and only activity is the start of the film cycle selected by audiovisual duo Jigoku (a tribute to the Japanese cult flick about a descent into the inferno) with 'The End' as a theme: destruction, the end of days, the Apocalypse, and so on. The movie marathon at the Pod Baranami space will feature the documentary “The Late Great Planet Earth”, narrated by Orson Welles, the mythical “Mad Max”, which brought the world Mel Gibson on a dry planet with mortal traffic, “This Is Not A Test” and “Les Temps Morts”. All that, at a more than accessible price: 15 złoty, less than 4 euro. There will be film viewings here all week.