October is the unofficial month-long holiday honoring Unsound Kraków, and given that the legendary avant-garde music festival is now thoroughly underway, you’d be forgiven for glossing over a newsworthy footnote posted to the Unsound website mid-last week. Visitors to (and residents of) Kraków will now be able to able to witness the curation of Unsound year-round, because the festival has just “joined forces” with Forum Przestrzenie to open a brand new club called 89, henceforth dedicated to becoming a “key point on the Polish and European underground club circuit.” Certainly, the Unsound name doesn’t hurt in the gradual achievement of that goal, and it also helps for all of the literalists out there that the club is situated beneath the Hotel Forum, an expansive and now totally abandoned brutalist building that opened in… well, I’ve given it away already.
1989 was also the year that communism ended in Poland, and as one might expect with the passionate overthrow of any political system, the 89 clubspace (formerly Crazy Dragon) was reportedly the site of “unhinged” debauchery and eventually a full-blown (no pun intended) strip club. The original decor has allegedly remained untouched for 89’s purposes, but I can’t be alone in hoping that a once-off scrub-down happens, if it hasn’t already, before the much anticipated ribbon-cutting.
An after party “pre-opening peek into 89” is scheduled for October 22 and October 23. Check the lineup alongside Unsound’s press release on the subject.
