Most festivals that expand to a second city ship the same package down the road: same headliners, same sets, different postcode. Unsound is doing the opposite for its 2026 edition. Warsaw gets its own complete programme from October 2 to 6, Kraków gets a different one from October 8 to 11, and organisers are explicit that no performance repeats between the two. Under the theme SOFT POWER, that's not a scheduling footnote, it's a curatorial bet: two full, independently booked festivals in the space of ten days, connected only by a single train ride.
Why refuse to repeat a single set?
Running two non-overlapping bills instead of one touring package is the harder, costlier way to do a two-city festival. Unsound is leaning into it anyway, and the connective tissue is almost as ambitious as the lineup split: the Unsound Train departs Warsaw on October 7, the rest day between legs, and runs over eight hours to Kraków with a stop in Kielce for a full concert from Radical Polish Arkestra, plus DJ sets running in a dedicated club carriage the whole way. Combo passholders covering both cities get priority access to seats on it. It reframes the gap between festivals as programming in its own right, not dead time.
What is Shane Parish actually doing with Autechre's catalogue?
Here's the part worth getting right: Autechre are not playing Unsound, and this isn't a collaboration in any formal sense. Shane Parish, an American guitarist best known for the avant-rock band Ahleuchatistas, spent years transcribing Autechre tracks from the duo's first four albums (1993-1998) and rearranging them for solo acoustic guitar, no overdubs, no effects. The result, "Autechre Guitar," came out independently in February 2026 on Palilalia Records, and it's now getting a live premiere in Poland. Autechre are among the most guarded acts in electronic music, they rarely license material and almost never make public appearances, so a note-by-note acoustic deconstruction of their most inaccessible early work, performed live for the first time, is a genuinely strange thing to watch unfold on a festival stage.
Who else is on the two bills, and how do you actually get between them?
Blawan headlines a live set built around "Gi Mi Keys Back / Auto Fake," his new two-track EP for XL Recordings that dropped digitally on September 25, with vinyl following in November. It's a deliberate pivot back toward the dancefloor after last year's more experimental SickElixir LP.
"I thought I'd stopped enjoying making stuff for the floor," Blawan said of the new material, "but testing the waters regularly always surprises me."
Dengue Dengue Dengue, the Lima-based duo who built their name fusing Peruvian and Afro-Latin rhythm with club-system bass weight, play around a new release of their own. Earlier waves added Arca performing her album Airdoll, Diamanda Galás at the Warsaw Philharmonic, and back-to-back sets pairing Juliana Huxtable with JASSS and Kode9 with Nikki Nair. Festival-goers who want both legs need a Warsaw-Kraków combo pass; the train is the only way Unsound officially links the two.
