New Forms Festival 2013 in Vancouver. Photo by Scott Kaplan.Signs of a booming industry are everywhere: media conglomerates are snapping up EDM bacchanals as worthy investments, Vegas clubs are competing over top dogs like Calvin Harris and Tiesto, and a handful of record selectors are pulling major league paydays. Yet, in the face of this rising neon wave, I feel only… irrelevence. I still remember going to the first Identity Festival in 2011, which featured artists like, um, The Disco Biscuits, and was held outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a "big shed" venue typically reserved for rock dinosaurs padding their retirement accounts. Climbing over a grassy knoll, I encountered a morass of 50-foot high inflatable cans and "Sex Drugs and Dubstep" shirts. Thousands of kids in stunna shades went hyphy while Datsik steered the crowd through drop after pummeling drop. I was terrified.
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But even while this tsunami of laser-fried inanity threatens to wash over the world, an undercurrent of adventurous festivals are pushing back. Boasting lineups that could be culled from the pages of avant music bible The Wire, festivals like Vancouver's New Forms, Krakow's Unsound and Pittsburgh's VIA (which, in full disclosure, I book talent for) stand in stark contrast to EDM circuses like Electric Daisy Carnival and Ultra Music Festival. The programming at these experimental festivals border on the academic; forums on afrofuturism co-exist with club nights. Hardware improv groups like Juju & Jordash play alongside ideological forefathers like Theo Parrish. The spirit of hedonism is tempered with a need to place partying in a historical context. And the music? Well, it couldn't be further from standard big festival fare, which the English music critic Simon Reynolds lovingly referred to as "Monster energy drink for the ears."
Ital at Unsound 2012's Bunker event in NYC. Photo by Seze Devres.New Forms just rang in its 13th year by filling its venues to capacity for the first time. Malcolm Levy, one of the festival's founders, credits larger EDM events with carving out a niche for events like his. "We've been involved in this a very long time—longer than a lot of these young movements," he says, "Those festivals are more like big rock concerts. The spectacle of it…even the samples and sounds used…. [are] more similar to heavy metal than anything that is happening at Mutek or New Forms or Unsound." Events like Unsound draw as much from the warehouse techno tradition as they do from the legacy of cultish noise music gatherings like NYC's now-defunct No Fun Fest and the touring International Noise Conference. And many of the events' headlining DJs are recovering noise-heads themselves, weirdos who have since swapped their pedals and contact mikes for a pair of turntables.
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A captivated audience at New Forms 2013. Photo by VANDOCUMENT.Some festival magnates, like Electric Daisy Carnival's Pasquale Rotale, demonstrate a talent for empire building and a penchant for private helicopters. But Levy sounds more like an art curator. "We obviously pride ourselves in looking at what's next, but also what's happened, and how different artists are representative of that history as a whole," he says. "A lot of different people at the festival are checking out each other's sets; for instance, Dopplereffekt's Gerald Donald was very excited to see [synth pioneer Donald] Buchla perform."The kind of cultural conversation that New Forms fosters extends beyond international borders at Unsound, a bleeding-edge festival based in Poland that will present a London edition this weekend and a seven-day festivals in Krakow next month. 65 percent of Unsound's audience travels from other countries, and it has also staged events in New York, Adelaide, Prague, Warsaw, Bratslava, Kiev and Minsk.
Lizzi Bougatsos at Unsound Festival NY, 2011. Photo by Stephen Cardinale.Unsound's globe-trotting growth is thanks, in part, to their emphasis on strong, ambitious concepts rather than massive headliners. For example, Unsound 2011 was based on a book. And not just any book, but Alvin Toffler's 1970 futurist tome, Future Shock, which focused on information overload and antiquated imaginings of the future. This year, Unsound's theme is "interference," and the festival mandates a "community-enforced" ban on phones and cameras. As founder Mat Schulz puts it, the ban will help the audience "explore this question of whether stimulating fewer senses can sometimes lead to deep engagement." Ambient musician Robert Rich will also present a 7-hour sleep concert—a special event where audiences curl up in sleeping bags, doze off to music designed to influence their REM sleep cycles… and wake up to tea served by Rich himself. While all of this might sound a bit like an art school camp, nothing could be more different from the face of today's electronic dance scene, with its hypercolor masses and sensory overload.
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Buchla music boxes at New Forms 2013. Photo by VANDOCUMENT.Unsound's lineup has much in common with New Forms, presenting artists like I-F (aka Interrference) and Regis alongside creative heirs like Karenn and the young American producers of the White Material imprint. Obscurantism aside, Schulz questions the idea of a real underground in the age of instantaneous discovery. "There's a distinction to be made between Unsound and commercial festivals," he says, "But I don't know if there is any truly 'underground' music festival. If there is, it probably only has ten people at it." Regardless, Schulz, like Levy, is sticking to his guns. "Invite one EDM artist to the party, next thing you know you might have all of them!" Schulz says, insisting that booking audience-friendly headliners as a way of introducing people to more obscure DJs is a risky proposition. "It can start to dilute the original idea of a festival," he says, "to make it lose its character."
Dopplereffekt at New Forms 2013. Photo by VANDOCUMENT.What experimental festivals like New Forms and Unsound are experiencing is not the epochal, overnight success of EDM but a slow growth of an audience open to cultural conversations. Profits may fall short of seven figures (or even five), but that was never the point. Levy shrugs off the idea of existing in a vacuum, seeing New Forms, Unsound, Mutek and others as the nucleus of a burgeoning electronic culture: "You see so many different movements and cross-pollination happening within electronic music. People who five to ten years ago wouldn't be interested in the kind of electronic music we're curating are very interested now." Perhaps next year, I'll see some of my friends from the Rockstar Stage in Krakow.Sorry folks, New Forms Festival happened on September 12 to 15. But you can still catch Unsound London from September 26 to 29, and Unsound Krakow from October 13 to 20. Check out the lineup here.
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A captivated audience at New Forms 2013. Photo by VANDOCUMENT.Some festival magnates, like Electric Daisy Carnival's Pasquale Rotale, demonstrate a talent for empire building and a penchant for private helicopters. But Levy sounds more like an art curator. "We obviously pride ourselves in looking at what's next, but also what's happened, and how different artists are representative of that history as a whole," he says. "A lot of different people at the festival are checking out each other's sets; for instance, Dopplereffekt's Gerald Donald was very excited to see [synth pioneer Donald] Buchla perform."The kind of cultural conversation that New Forms fosters extends beyond international borders at Unsound, a bleeding-edge festival based in Poland that will present a London edition this weekend and a seven-day festivals in Krakow next month. 65 percent of Unsound's audience travels from other countries, and it has also staged events in New York, Adelaide, Prague, Warsaw, Bratslava, Kiev and Minsk.
Buchla music boxes at New Forms 2013. Photo by VANDOCUMENT.Unsound's lineup has much in common with New Forms, presenting artists like I-F (aka Interrference) and Regis alongside creative heirs like Karenn and the young American producers of the White Material imprint. Obscurantism aside, Schulz questions the idea of a real underground in the age of instantaneous discovery. "There's a distinction to be made between Unsound and commercial festivals," he says, "But I don't know if there is any truly 'underground' music festival. If there is, it probably only has ten people at it." Regardless, Schulz, like Levy, is sticking to his guns. "Invite one EDM artist to the party, next thing you know you might have all of them!" Schulz says, insisting that booking audience-friendly headliners as a way of introducing people to more obscure DJs is a risky proposition. "It can start to dilute the original idea of a festival," he says, "to make it lose its character."
Dopplereffekt at New Forms 2013. Photo by VANDOCUMENT.What experimental festivals like New Forms and Unsound are experiencing is not the epochal, overnight success of EDM but a slow growth of an audience open to cultural conversations. Profits may fall short of seven figures (or even five), but that was never the point. Levy shrugs off the idea of existing in a vacuum, seeing New Forms, Unsound, Mutek and others as the nucleus of a burgeoning electronic culture: "You see so many different movements and cross-pollination happening within electronic music. People who five to ten years ago wouldn't be interested in the kind of electronic music we're curating are very interested now." Perhaps next year, I'll see some of my friends from the Rockstar Stage in Krakow.Sorry folks, New Forms Festival happened on September 12 to 15. But you can still catch Unsound London from September 26 to 29, and Unsound Krakow from October 13 to 20. Check out the lineup here. 
