Techno in Poland: from bunkers to Unsound

Freedom and empty buildings

After 1989 suddenly everything was possible in Poland, including parties nobody had heard of before. The first raves of the early 1990s took place in bunkers, squats, abandoned warehouses and factory halls. In Warsaw the club Filtry in the Ochota district, open from 1992 to 1994, became a legend. Mixtapes and music from Western radio stations passed from hand to hand.

The Freedom Parade

In the second half of the 1990s Łódź had its own answer to Berlin's Love Parade, mentioned in the Berlin lesson. The Parada Wolności (Freedom Parade) was organised by people from the Łódź club Alcatraz. For several years trucks with DJs and dancing crowds rolled through the city. In 2002 the city authorities banned it. The parade only returned in 2022.

Pioneers

One of the first Polish techno producers to make a name internationally is Warsaw's Jacek Sienkiewicz. He started in the 1990s with a TB-303, and around 2000 he founded his own label, Recognition. In 2002 Sven Väth's Frankfurt label Cocoon released his album "Téchnè", the first studio album in its catalogue. Sienkiewicz went on to collaborate with Ricardo Villalobos among others and played festivals from Detroit to Montreal.

Festivals

In 2003 the first Unsound took place in Kraków's cellar bars. Today it is one of the most respected festivals of experimental and electronic music in the world, held every October. Audioriver played by the Vistula in Płock from 2006 to 2023 and moved to Łódź in 2024. There are also Tauron Nowa Muzyka in Katowice and Warsaw's Instytut Festival, among others.

A new generation

Polish artists are now part of the global scene. Zamilska released the album "Untune" in 2014, dark industrial electronics. VTSS, Warsaw's Martyna Maja, changed her life plans after visiting Unsound in 2012: she dropped law and turned to sound. She played Berghain, and by 2022 she was releasing on Britain's Ninja Tune. A final fun fact: the name of Mord, the Rotterdam label of Dutch producer Bas Mooy, comes from the Polish word "morderstwo", meaning murder.