A Night at Unsound Adelaide 2026: Horrorcore, Detuned Harps and Goblin Ranting

A musician is sitting onstage, behind the sculptural outline of a harp. Another tucks a violin under their chin while singing in a haunting mezzo soprano. One might imagine their music floating up to a chapel’s gabled roof, but the group is far from angelic. The New York City duo LEYA once soundtracked an inclusive, multi-sexual-orientation porn film. The pair are deeply involved in underground music, which is what brings them to Lion Arts Factory to open Unsound Adelaide 2026 – Australia’s most consistently adventurous music festival.

Unsound started out in Wagga Wagga, NSW, founded by a group of friends involved in the local underground scene. That was in 2000. In 2003, Unsound’s current co-artistic director Mat Schulz, whose brother helped found the rural event, took the concept to Krakow, Poland, which remains its base today. The festival now pulls approximately 25,000 attendees annually, making it the most influential experimental music festival in Europe. Schulz and his co-artistic director Gosia Płysa also stage satellite iterations in places as diverse as London; New York; Tbilisi, Georgia; Osaka, Japan; and, since 2013, Adelaide.

Unlike Australia’s other winter festivals, Unsound has no particular aesthetic motif to market. It’s simply an expression of boundary-pushing music, set this year across four ticketed events: two sets live in Lion Arts Factory and Hindley Street Music Hall, and two club-focused nights at Ancient World, one of the country’s best community-focused microclubs. Out of economic necessity, but also artistic exploration, a number of artists play multiple events each year, presenting different sides of their craft.

If there’s one consistency to the Unsound program, it’s a sense of being outside of time, owing to the musicians either working at the future of music, or by having broken new ground in the past. Doomy post-punk, noise, rap and new visions of club music sit together on disparate line-ups that somehow make perfect sense. And there was no better example of this curation than on Friday.

The aforementioned LEYA placed the audience in a medieval reverie that was disrupted by harpist Marilu Donovan’s unconventionally tuned instrument and Adam Markiewicz’s electric violin. Between songs Markiewicz shuffled around, swigging from his beer, summing up a song with sentiments that have been held for millennia: “It’s about when you have a cat or a dog and they die and it’s sad.”

LEYA is followed by an improvisation between Japanese sound artist FUJI||||||||||TA and American experimental vocalist and producer Ka Baird, both known for their focus on breath and air pressure. The former produced rhythmic tapping and scraping with mic’d up percussive instruments and found objects; the latter blew on a flute, and bashed microphones together. At times the racket sounded like a grandfather clock being thrown out of a building, its demolition recorded and played backwards to the audience. Ka Baird’s vocal utterances kept with the mythic theme and could be mistaken for goblin ranting.

Unsound is known for instigating novel collaborations. Friday night’s third set brought together the Polish producer and DJ 2K88 with Rainy Miller, a confessional, avant-garde rapper from England’s north-west, and multidisciplinary artist Bianca Scout. Miller appeared spotlit in the middle of the crowd, hooded at a microphone, where he ranted and railed in the role of an autotuned town crier. As Miller pleaded and fumed, Scout played a kind of impish siren, soothing him one minute and goading him the next. It was hard to detect the boundaries of plan and improvision, and the highwire act was all the better for it.

Friday night closed with the truth telling of New York City rapper billy woods, heir to the crown of the late MF Doom as the rapper with an almost unrivalled vocabularic flow. The enigmatic woods (also one half of the noise rap duo Armand Hammer) simply hit play on a laptop, which is enough when you have the presence and enunciation to pull off the dense wordplay that is woods’s signature. The smoke machine mixed with the steam coming off his English breakfast tea as the crowd yelled lyrics back at him. There were highlights from across his catalogue, but most noticeably the album Golliwog, his 2025 horrorcore masterpiece that used the racist character as a demonic cypher to unpack institutional racism and the state of fear – both personal and civilisational – pervading modern life. If that sounds heavy, in reality woods delivers his messages with wry comedy.

Other highlights of the weekend included hometown favourite DJ Cookie closing their Ancient World club set with the new Machinedrum track BOUNCE N SLIDE; two sets from minimalist UK producer Actress: a wild DJ set on Friday and on Saturday a collaboration with the ’70s synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani; and the off-kilter lounge punk of Colombia’s Lucrecia Dalt. One doesn’t need to love everything – the lauded New York City rock band YHWH Nailgun, the most conventional outfit of the weekend, was not for me – but the crowd lapped it up.

But Unsound’s Friday night tells the story of what makes this festival so special. In one night, the featured artists took in the breadth of human emotion: profound beauty, fits of paranoia and unfiltered truth. Using instruments both ancient and modern, they were a collection of artists, unmoored from time and trends, united by nothing more than a desire to push their respective forms to the very edges of what’s possible.

The writer travelled as a guest of the festival.