Unsound has been a Krakow festival since it started in 2003. On October 2, that stops being true, at least for one edition: the 2026 program opens in Warsaw, runs there through October 6, then relocates to Krakow for a second leg from October 8 to 11. Per Unsound's own announcement, this is the first time in the festival's history that its flagship autumn edition splits across two cities.
Why split a festival built on one city's identity?
Unsound's pull has always been partly geographic: a specific, unglamorous, wintering-into-autumn Krakow, its churches and factories turned into rooms for noise and drone. Fragmenting that into two cities is a real structural bet, not a marketing flourish. Artistic director Mat Schulz framed the move in the announcement around a bigger idea than logistics.
"A festival can be more than the sum of its individual bookings."
The two legs aren't left to drift apart on their own. A dedicated Unsound train runs Warsaw to Krakow on October 7, in the gap between the two city programs, sold as its own ticket. It's a literal, physical thread stitching the split festival back together, and a fittingly analog answer to a program that spends its discourse strand talking about networks, surveillance and control.
What is SOFT POWER actually arguing?
The 2026 theme, SOFT POWER, points the festival's talks and panels at AI, surveillance and artistic resistance, the soft mechanisms by which control gets exercised without ever announcing itself as control. Running that theme in the same year Unsound decentralizes its own structure isn't subtle, and it doesn't need to be: a festival talking about the dangers of centralization just proved it can operate without a single center.
Who's actually playing?
The first wave leads with two rare bookings. Diamanda Galás, the avant-garde vocalist whose confrontational, operatic work has made her a reluctant legend of experimental music for four decades, plays a performance Unsound itself calls rare. Liars perform "Drum's Not Dead" in full for its 20th anniversary, one of the more structurally strange, percussion-driven records to come out of 2000s art rock. Alongside them, the announcement names RABIT, Debit and gyrofield, with the full lineup still to come.
For a festival whose entire identity rests on unpredictable, left-field programming, that combination, a confrontational vocal icon and a two-decade-old noise-rock record played whole, is a statement about what Unsound still considers essential even as its shape changes underneath it.
