Unsound Announces 2025 Theme WEB, Encompassing Editions in Kraków, Osaka and New York

The Unsound 2025 theme is WEB, applied to a cluster of autumn festivals with Kraków at its heart. These include:

Unsound Osaka - September 5th - 7th

Unsound Kraków - October 7th - 12th

Unsound New York - October 30th - November 2nd

WEB is the tangle of interconnections between these events, their artists and audiences. The theme is multifold. In a global context, WEB refers to the building of cultural networks across borders, zones and scenes, a longtime mission of Unsound that becomes increasingly challenging in the face of geopolitical rupture and reconfiguration.

Of course, WEB also references the internet (especially in its first couple of decades; usage of the word “web” peaked in the mid-2000s) and its optimistic air of radical possibility. Today, the internet feels like a spider’s trap, part of a wider online and IRL matrix of control, seduction, coercion and desire – with all of us the prey. “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive,” wrote poet Walter Scott in 1808, not anticipating how vast a web of lies, truths, and half-truths might grow via technologically mediated propaganda, conspiracy theories, and memes. The Medium is (still) The Message, shaping the scale, speed and patterns of our interactions, our senses and perception of reality.

Accordingly, the Unsound discourse program will traverse the sticky and tangled threads of platform capital and oligarchy, mass distraction, Deep and Dark Webs, AI ecologies and economies, enshitification, influencer cults and celebrity culture.  “Sharing” is what we constantly do, driving entire industries by volunteering our geolocation, loves, hates, and very selves. 

Unsound will look at the pirate file-sharing networks, from early radical positions on copyright and decentralised distribution, to today’s cynical streaming industries, in which AI-created ambience seems more likely to prosper than human musicians. One form of resistance to homogeneity is live music, from niche festivals to small grassroot club nights, but corporate monopolies of ticketing, concert promotion, venue ownership and booking agencies threaten our fragile ecosystems. Webs within webs. 

And the Unsound Kraków 2025 music program will also focus on bands and collaborations – human networks sharing realspace and realtime. The festival’s programming will explore throughlines of influence, the ways that tangled threads of the past affect music in the present, as well as the nowness of post-Internet sounds. Durational shows will draw attendees in, in contrast to the contemporary preference for quick hits and fractured focus.  

This year’s Unsound Open Call is directed at the discourse program, embracing talks, presentations, workshops and performative lectures. Entries close May 30th. Please don’t submit entries to the music program this year – these will not be assessed. Enter the WEB and apply here.

Note, although not officially part of the autumn cluster of events, Unsound Adelaide is also coming, in July – stay tuned for an announcement this Wednesday! Also coming soon is news of the 2025 Unsound Lab Summer School, again to take place in early August.

Last but not least, Ephemera - Unsound's younger sister – returns to Warsaw from June 11 to 15. Join us to celebrate collective rituals and the longest days of summer with unique performances by SUNN O))), ASIANDOPEBOYS, LEYA, Still House Plants, aya, Danny Harle and many more. See the already-announced program here.