UNSOUND FESTIVAL 2012 Trailer

Trailer for UNSOUND festival's 2012 edition themed "THE END".

The trailer previews one of the many festival locations, Krakow's former Hotel Forum, that has been disused since 2002. In October 2012, Unsound artists raised the grand communist-era hotel from deathly slumber for one more breath of life before: The End.

Video Concept & Creation: MFO (Lucy Benson, Marcel Weber)
Audio: 'Erosion Of Mediocrity' by Demdike Stare
Titles Design: Piotr Jakubowicz

Excerpt from UNSOUND's mission statement:

We’re also connecting the 10th edition to “THE END”. This theme draws energy and ideas from 2012’s apocalyptic atmosphere which has affected much recent music, from the gently dystopian to fierce brutal dance tracks influenced by noise as much as techno. [...] “THE END” also touches on the notion of festivals themselves, which can feel like microcosmic manifestations of the same dynamic that is bringing about end times: small, self-replicating worlds where choice is over-abundant and an ethos of consumption reigns.

Festival's 2012 edition website

The trailer is inspired by the festival's theme as well as by the Hotel Forum itself, a massive, modernist building, the first computerized hotel in Poland — abandoned these days and used a as giant billboard. With its brutalist architecture and art-deco interior it conveys a feeling of grand past days while simultaneously carrying the heaviness of a derelict place, of a haunted house.

With the upcoming Unsound Festival's THE END in mind, Hotel Forum was to become exactly that — haunted. Unsound's gathering was intended to happen as if it was a gateway opening to another dimension. Hotel Forum becoming a portal between worlds, past and future, economic and artistic, order and chaos; an unlikely overlap and a temporal phenomenon. This notion is being explored and depicted in the trailer.

Another, unrealised idea was to intercut the above linked, optimistic advertisement clip from 1989 with scenes of its current abandoned state, containing "future-past" fragments, i.e.  flight tickets for artists that will play at Unsound - issued on dated needle prints. Creating a blend of these contrary impressions and creating an inter-time fragment pointing towards the duality of the festival's theme. Unfortunately the state of Hotel Forum didn't allow to realise that idea.