Wroclaw Industrial Festival marks 25th anniversary with four days of music and art

5-8 November 2026 | Wroclaw, Poland

There is something rather extraordinary about watching twenty-five years of musical history unfold on a screen, especially when so many of the names and faces belong to your own history as well. That was how the anniversary edition of Wrocław Industrial Festival began. After the traditional welcome from Anna Frett, Maciek Frett and Arek Bagiński, a film revisited the musicians who have passed through WIF over the years. The names kept appearing: different generations, countries, musical traditions and artistic temperaments. I recognised people whose concerts I had attended, artists I had photographed, others whose work had altered the way I listened. Seen together, they offered a startling measure of what this festival has contributed to industrial and experimental culture, in Poland and far beyond it.

The story began in November 2001, when Maciej Frett and his collaborators organised the first edition at La Fête, a club situated in a former German bunker beneath Wzgórze Partyzantów. The initiative grew from activities already developing in Wrocław throughout the late 1990s, including Frett’s concert series Młodzi po stronie maszyn (Young People on the Side of Machines), his involvement with Job Karma and Arkadiusz Bagiński’s independent film screenings. These interests gradually converged into an event that would become one of Europe’s most recognisable gatherings devoted to industrial and experimental culture.

In interviews marking the anniversary, Frett recalled how modest and labour-intensive those beginnings were. During the early editions in Sala Gotycka, the organisers carried stage and sound equipment upstairs themselves, built much of the setup from scratch and even taped the windows to stop them vibrating under the pressure of the music.

I remember those years myself: the wonderfully chaotic, fiercely DIY atmosphere, makeshift installations, vegetarian food and almost unbearable November cold. We sat through performances in winter coats because Sala Gotycka was practically freezing. The conditions could be unforgiving, but the enthusiasm was enormous. There was something beautiful about that collective determination to make room for music that had so few places in which to exist.

A quarter of a century later, WIF is an internationally recognised festival with professional production and a formidable history. Yet it still feels familiar. The scale has changed; the curiosity, openness and sense of community have survived. Just as importantly, it has resisted becoming a gathering for a select few who already know the rules. Its programme is an invitation to listen beyond one’s preferences, sometimes placing artists side by side who have little in common except a refusal to accept the limits of their instruments.

As Frett has explained, this eclecticism was there from the start. Industrial music was a point of departure rather than a boundary: dark ambient, noise, experimental electronics, post-punk, neofolk and audiovisual performance all found their way into the conversation. The value of that approach becomes clear not on paper, in a list of genres, but over the course of an evening, when one performance changes how you hear the next.

It is one of the reasons I keep returning. I want to see musicians whose work has accompanied me for years, but I also want to be surprised. Some of my most lasting festival memories began with a name I barely recognised on the schedule.

This year’s programme was particularly intensive. I could not attend every concert and missed Sunday’s performances altogether, so what follows is an account of the days I experienced, rather than a claim to have seen everything. Between Thursday and Saturday I moved from cinemas to galleries to stages, met artists, reunited with old friends, made new acquaintances and tried, sometimes rather hopelessly, to absorb it all while working with my camera. The sold-out anniversary was happening in the concert halls, certainly, but also in every corridor and conversation between them.

With such a history behind it, the anniversary might easily have turned into an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, much of its excitement came from the tension between remembering and discovering.

Thursday, November 5 – In The Nursery: The Passion of Joan of Arc

The celebrations began at Kino Nowe Horyzonty with In The Nursery performing their soundtrack for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Founded in Sheffield in 1981 by twin brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone, In The Nursery have spent more than four decades developing a distinctive musical language combining electronics, orchestral percussion, classical instrumentation and cinematic composition. Their fascination with the relationship between moving images and sound has found a particularly interesting expression in the Optical Music Series, through which they have created soundtracks for classic silent films.

Dreyer’s film presents a formidable challenge to any composer. Its severe close-ups of Renée Falconetti’s face expose an astonishing range of emotional and psychological states. The austerity of the images, and the almost unbearable intensity of Joan’s interrogation, leave little room for musical gestures that merely underline what is already visible.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way music alters our perception of an image. It can draw attention towards a detail we might otherwise miss, change the emotional temperature of a scene or open an ambiguity rather than resolve it. But when the images possess this much expressive force, the greatest temptation may be to do too much.

In The Nursery avoided that trap. Their orchestral textures, electronic arrangements and carefully paced dramatic passages followed the film’s psychological tension without imposing a single interpretation upon it. At moments the score intensified the pressure; elsewhere it withdrew enough for Falconetti’s face to do the work. Neither medium was reduced to an illustration of the other.

There was particular beauty in the way the compositions seemed to inhabit the spaces between gestures and expressions. Falconetti’s face already communicates so much, yet the soundtrack introduced another degree of emotional depth without attempting to explain what was happening.

I left feeling that I had encountered the film anew. That is a rare achievement for a live soundtrack: not to compete with images of such power, but to make their silences and uncertainties audible. It was an inspired way to open a festival devoted to exploring what sound can do.

Later that evening, DJ Eric continued the programme in the cellar of Stary Klasztor.

Friday, November 6 Photography, Metal, Guitars and Mechanical Poetry

‘SALT.WIF’ – Stefan Alt’s photographic history

Friday began with the vernissage of SALT.WIF, a photography exhibition by Stefan Alt at Galeria ZPAF, organised in cooperation with the German Consulate General in Wrocław, the Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) and Industrial Art.

I’ve followed and admired Stefan’s work for years, not only as the founder of ant-zen, but as a visual artist whose aesthetic has become inseparable from the music surrounding his label. His album covers, photography, merchandise and graphic compositions possess a raw, understated beauty. There is poetry in their restraint: the simplicity of the forms, the grain of a surface, a contrast or a small detail that might initially escape notice. Nothing seems excessive, yet the simplest image can hold an astonishing density of associations.

The exhibition occupied two rooms. One presented predominantly black-and-white concert photography; the strong contrasts worked particularly well against the gallery’s white walls. The other contained more intimate backstage portraits and photographic sessions Stefan has conducted with musicians appearing at WIF over the years.

Walking through those rooms was also a journey into my own memories. I recognised artists, performances and moments I had witnessed myself. Looking at familiar faces through Stefan’s eyes, I repeatedly caught myself thinking, I was there. I remember that concert.

As a photographer, I find this particularly meaningful. We may photograph the same people and inhabit the same spaces, but what attracts our attention – and what we finally choose to preserve – can be entirely different. Stefan’s images reveal the sensitivity I’ve admired for years: his ability to recognise the emotional weight of an apparently simple gesture or an unguarded detail.

The exhibition deserves a separate article. For this anniversary, though, it served another purpose: it made the festival’s history visible through the people who have lived it. Concert photography may document a performance, but sometimes it preserves something harder to name: a relationship, a mood, a fraction of a second that returns a whole evening to your memory.

PFFFT…!

Friday’s concerts began with PFFFT…!, a project rooted in the experimental underground of Leipzig in the former East Germany. Founded in 1984 by Jürgen ‘chAos’ Gutjahr and fellow musicians from the city’s punk and experimental scene, PFFFT…! developed an approach to improvisation built around unconventional materials and a rejection of familiar musical structures.

PFFFT…! emerged from an environment in which musical experimentation could also carry political consequences. Gutjahr’s earlier involvement with Wutanfall, one of Leipzig’s pioneering punk groups, had attracted the attention of the East German authorities, and the transition towards industrial noise represented another way of challenging established artistic conventions.

At Wrocław Industrial Festival, a lone performer explored the physical properties of sound through metal objects and industrial materials. Armed with what appeared to be wooden sticks or batons, he struck different elements, drawing out hard metallic impacts, irregular vibrations and rough, unpredictable resonances.

It was fascinating to watch the material answer back. Every strike revealed something about the resistance, density and acoustic character of the object: some sounds ended abruptly, while others continued to vibrate long after the movement that had produced them.

Behind him, enormous grey concrete blocks formed an austere, almost brutalist landscape. Their monumental stillness made a striking contrast with the movement onstage. Concrete suggested mass and permanence; the percussion turned equally hard materials into something unstable, fleeting and alive.

The visual and acoustic elements shared an industrial vocabulary, but they did not simply duplicate one another. The rigid geometry of the projections gave the irregular sounds a sense of scale, as though we were hearing the architecture being tested, piece by piece.

At times the performance approached pure noise, with individual impacts replacing recognisable rhythmic structures. Yet the connection between gesture and sound remained legible throughout. You could see where an event began, then follow its unexpected life through the room – an unusually direct reminder that noise, too, has a physical origin.

What stayed with me was that tactile immediacy: the act of striking, the object’s resistance, the vibration left behind. PFFFT…! brought industrial music back to matter itself, while making the concrete images above the stage seem almost touchable.

Blood and Sun

Blood and Sun brought a welcome change of temperature to Friday’s programme. Founded by American musician Luke Tromiczak, the project draws on dark folk, acoustic traditions and a poetic approach to songwriting, with melody, instrumentation and the expressive qualities of the human voice closely intertwined.

Bathed in deep red light, the musicians created an atmosphere that was solemn yet strangely warm. The instrumentation caught my attention immediately: guitars, what sounded like violin, individually struck cymbals used for their metallic resonance rather than to maintain a conventional beat, and an unusual tabletop instrument resembling a small console. Delicate metallic accents appeared between sustained strings and guitar passages, lending the arrangements a rich, grainy character.

At the centre were Tromiczak’s deep vocals, delivered with a ballad-like gravity. There was poetry in the way he sang, recalling a tradition of storytelling in which a voice carries not only words but traces of the lives and losses behind them.

The compositions developed patiently, allowing melodic lines to rise out of the ensemble and recede again. I was especially taken by the cymbals: struck individually, they created a ringing space around the music instead of forcing it into a fixed rhythmic framework. Their lingering resonance gave even the quieter passages an almost ceremonial quality.

I loved the sense of musical matter being shaped through those different instrumental voices. The arrangements were complex, but never obscured the directness of the songs; the saturated red light seemed to deepen their melancholy without making the performance feel cold.

Blood and Sun left me with the impression of music built from small, carefully chosen gestures – a voice, the decay of a cymbal, a line of guitar – rather than grand effects. Its intimacy was all the stronger for that restraint.

Robert J. Revell

Robert J. Revell brought Friday into far more punishing territory: guitars, electronics, distortion and a level of physical energy that was difficult to escape.

A musician and composer whose interests extend across industrial music, metal, noise and experimental composition, Revell has developed a musical language combining distortion with intricate sonic construction. His 2025 solo album, Torn Remnants of Nobility, released through Klanggalerie, offers an introduction to these interests.

He is also the son of Graeme Revell, founder of SPK, a connection that made his appearance particularly interesting in anticipation of their collaborative performance the following evening.

Onstage, aggressive guitars pushed against dense electronic layers, while relentlessly flashing lights made the whole experience disorienting. The sound had weight; it seemed to occupy every available part of the room.

I experienced this concert with my entire body. The pressure of the bass, the sharpness of the guitars and the vibrations travelling through the room seemed to operate beyond ordinary listening. At moments, the music felt as though it had temporarily taken possession of my nervous system.

It was almost painful to listen to. Certain frequencies seemed to push my ears towards their limits, yet that very extremity made the experience strangely compelling. I knew how exhausting it was becoming and still wanted to remain inside it. That contradiction – the instinct to withdraw and the desire to hear what came next – was part of the performance’s power.

Underneath the apparent disorder, however, the structures were remarkably controlled. The guitars supplied a raw, almost bodily aggression; the electronics imposed a colder mechanical pressure. Their points of collision were more interesting than the volume alone, and the lighting sharpened those collisions until it became difficult to separate what I was hearing from what I was seeing.

It was exhausting and exhilarating, and it left me curious about how Robert would redirect that energy when he joined Graeme Revell as SPKtR the following evening.

Halo Manash

Friday’s programme also included Halo Manash, the Finnish experimental project active since 2003. Its work inhabits a distinctive area of ritual ambient, drawing on drones, environmental recordings, acoustic instrumentation and ceremonial practices to explore relationships between sound, nature and consciousness.

Halo Manash frequently use field recordings and unconventional acoustic sources, allowing the characteristics of a place or material to become part of the composition. Ritual is not merely an aesthetic reference in this work, but one of the ways its creators structure the act of listening.

Their inclusion illustrated another side of WIF’s programming: the willingness to place contemplative, environment-oriented sound alongside music that insists on overwhelming the senses.

The Legendary Pink Dots

Writing about legends is a peculiar exercise. What can one possibly say about The Legendary Pink Dots that hasn’t already been said a hundred times? Their history has been documented, their influence discussed, their extraordinary musical universe analysed from almost every conceivable angle.

One could take a personal approach, of course, but then again, who needs another essay about what a particular band means to the person writing it? Perhaps the sensible thing is simply to describe what happened onstage – although, with The Legendary Pink Dots, even that turns out to be unexpectedly difficult.

What happened at Wrocław Industrial Festival was pure magic. I know how that sounds. Normally, I’d ask a writer to be more precise. Here, I found myself reaching for exactly the word I would usually mistrust.

Edward Ka-Spel and his fellow musicians have spent more than four decades developing a world in which distinctions between music, poetry, theatre and storytelling begin to lose their usefulness. Ka-Spel’s unmistakable voice possesses a peculiar intimacy. Tender one moment, unsettling the next, sometimes carrying wonderfully mischievous humour, it can turn an ordinary phrase into something mysterious. Around him, electronic textures, delicate melodies and psychedelic excursions follow their own imaginative logic.

Beauty and unease coexist naturally within these compositions. Melancholy may suddenly reveal a playful edge; seemingly innocent melodies acquire shadows. Musical ideas appear, develop and vanish, while the instrumentation introduces associations that sometimes contradict the words rather than explain them.

That instability held the performance together. A tender passage could become faintly threatening without any obvious rupture, and a shift in Ka-Spel’s delivery might introduce humour just when the music appeared to be taking itself most seriously. It felt like listening to a story whose meaning was being revised even as it was told.

You can describe the arrangements, the voice, the instrumental details and the range of references. You can trace influences and analyse structures. But those tools don’t quite account for the moment when a room full of listeners seems willing to follow a strange little story wherever it goes.

So, for once, I will keep the word magic. Not as an excuse to abandon criticism, but because part of the pleasure was recognising the point at which analysis stopped being enough.

Crash Course in Science

Crash Course in Science were the last band I saw on Friday, and they turned out to be one of the happiest surprises of the entire festival.

Formed in Philadelphia in 1979 by Dale Feliciello, Mallory Yago and Michael Zodorozny, the group emerged from an environment in which punk, performance art and experiments with primitive electronics offered alternatives to conventional music-making. Their fascination with homemade synthesizers, modified equipment, drum machines and everyday objects produced an electronic language that remains wonderfully peculiar nearly five decades later.

There is a particular pleasure in arriving at a concert without knowing quite what awaits you. I am reminded of that whenever WIF introduces me to a musician I might otherwise have overlooked.

Crash Course in Science were precisely that kind of discovery. Somehow, despite all my years of listening to experimental electronic music, I had never encountered them – not live, not even on record. It was quite simply love at first hearing.

Their music showed just how much personality can inhabit an apparently mechanical arrangement. The vocals, delivered in a detached, almost clinical manner, sounded like fragments of industrial poetry recited over synthetic rhythms. I loved the absurdity of that combination: the emotional restraint of the voices against the exuberance of the instrumentation, the odd phrasing of the words against melodies pursuing an agenda entirely their own.

And those rhythms! Sharp, playful synthesizer patterns, eccentric electronic sequences and melodies that went straight into the body. I found myself moving before I’d even begun to understand the musical structures responsible for the reaction.

Creating electronic music that is irresistibly danceable without falling into mechanical repetition is an art in itself. It calls for timing, a sense of when to disrupt a pattern and, above all, an ability to make the listener curious about what the machine might do next.

Crash Course in Science have that instinct. Each time a groove threatens to settle into something predictable, an awkward sound, an unexpected accent or a mischievous melodic turn pulls it sideways again. The music invites your muscles to participate, but refuses to leave your imagination behind.

Their fascination with homemade electronics, modified equipment and unlikely sound sources is central to the group’s history, but technological novelty is not the reason the songs still work. What matters is the imagination that makes those eccentric ideas memorable, and the wonderfully human wit that animates the machines.

I loved that mischievous intelligence: the deadpan delivery, the twitchy precision, the sense that every apparently simple motif might be concealing another joke. It was clever without sounding pleased with its own cleverness, and enormously fun.

Crash Course in Science became one of my favourite discoveries of the anniversary edition. I arrived without expectations and left hungry to explore their music further. Almost fifty years after their formation, they acquired a new admirer – and a very enthusiastic one at that.

Control

Friday’s programme concluded with Control, the American power-electronics project of Thomas Garrison, active since the late 1990s.

Garrison’s work occupies an abrasive territory within the industrial underground, combining extreme frequencies, heavy low-end pressure and carefully constructed atmospheres. His compositions are concerned as much with tension and psychological effect as with the sheer force of the sound.

Alongside his musical activities, Garrison is known for his mastering work through Misanthrope Studio and his involvement with other experimental projects.

Control performed after I had left for the evening, so I cannot offer a firsthand account of the set. The project nevertheless represented an important strand of the programme: power electronics treated as a demanding form of composition rather than undifferentiated aggression.

The night continued with DJ sets from Ancient Methods and Philipp Strobel, extending the programme into industrial techno and contemporary underground electronic music.

Saturday, November 7

Saturday was, without question, my personal highlight of the anniversary edition. It moved from politically charged noise and dark ambient contemplation to intricately programmed electronics, ritual percussion and, finally, the formidable force of SPKtR.

The changes of scale and mood were dizzying. One moment I was listening for the smallest alteration in a quiet sound; later, the music seemed to bypass conscious thought and go directly to the body. This is precisely the kind of contrast I come to WIF for.

Espectra Negra

Saturday opened with Espectra Negra, the project of Mexican-born, Berlin-based artist Verónica Mota, whose work occupies the confrontational territories of power electronics, industrial noise and ritualistic experimentation.

Mota’s artistic background includes the political punk underground, and her work frequently addresses violence, power, control and disturbing aspects of human experience. Her 2025 album Empire, released through HANDS, offers an example of her ability to combine abrasive sonic forms with conceptual concerns.

At WIF, piercing frequencies, distorted screams, harsh noise and restless rhythmic patterns created an environment that gave the listener very little opportunity to settle. The visuals contributed to the unease without offering relief or explanation.

The compositions were constantly in motion. Just as a rhythm began to suggest some physical momentum, it could collapse into a dense mass of noise. At other points, even the suggestion of conventional musical organisation disappeared, leaving the sound exposed in all its roughness.

Some of the shrill frequencies bordered on physical pain. Yet what interested me was not extremity for its own sake, but the way the performance made endurance part of listening. You could not simply let the music pass over you; it demanded a response, even if that response was discomfort.

Mota’s screams gave the electronic violence a distinctly human centre. They were not a decorative addition to the noise, but a rupture within it, making the themes of control and aggression difficult to regard from a safe distance.

Espectra Negra opened Saturday with confrontation rather than invitation, a fierce statement about what noise can express when it refuses to make itself comfortable.

Empusae

I’ve been following Nicolas Van Meirhaeghe’s musical journey for many years, going back to his involvement with This Morn’ Omina. I’ve encountered his work through Empusae, Tzolk’in, Onus and collaborations across the industrial and experimental scene, each revealing a different corner of a mind that seems incapable of standing still.

What keeps drawing me back is not simply his range, but the recognisable sensitivity beneath those different identities. Even when his music becomes forbidding, there is usually something searching and profoundly human within it.

Over the years, Nicolas has created an extraordinary collection of sonic maps, each charting a different emotional and imaginative landscape. The paths he invites listeners to follow can be dark, disquieting, sometimes genuinely frightening, yet they invariably lead somewhere fascinating. Even his most unsettling compositions can discover poetry in sounds that initially appear hostile or alien.

At Wrocław Industrial Festival, Nicolas was accompanied by Christel Morvan (Nesisart), whose visual work has become closely intertwined with the Empusae universe. Together they created one of the performances that affected me most deeply this year.

There was something almost sacred about the atmosphere. The slowly unfolding compositions, delicate textures, subtle rhythmic movements and Christel’s magnificent imagery evoked an imaginary temple, a place removed from ordinary time, where music acquired the character of meditation.

The soundscapes breathed, expanded and receded, revealing new details with extraordinary patience. Nothing felt hurried or imposed. Every sound seemed to have its own place within this carefully imagined world.

Christel’s imagery brought its own poetry to this world. Rather than illustrating the compositions, it seemed to open corridors through them, allowing the eye to wander while the ear followed a different route. I loved that freedom: the possibility of occupying the same piece of music in more than one way.

That, to me, is the strength of their partnership. The images never tell you what to feel; the music never reduces the visuals to scenery. Both leave something unfinished for the listener to discover.

I found the performance profoundly moving. There is a particular tenderness in Nicolas’s musical language, even when he ventures into its darkest regions. He seems to understand that darkness can contain an almost infinite variety of emotions, including longing, fragility and wonder.

It also asked for patience. These pieces were not interested in delivering an immediate climax or an obvious narrative. They offered a space in which private memories and associations could surface without being directed.

I have followed Nicolas through so many different sonic territories, yet he still manages to take me somewhere I haven’t been. With Christel, that journey felt especially intimate – less like watching an audiovisual performance than being allowed, briefly, into a world the two of them had made together.

Apoptose

Apoptose changed the terms of listening again. After the richly imagined world of Empusae came a performance built around concentration, stillness and the weight of the smallest sound.

The German dark-ambient project, active since 1999, has developed a musical language rooted in field recordings, organic textures, understated electronics and an imaginative relationship with nature, memory and the subconscious.

A quiet gravity settled over the room. The audience was almost completely silent, attentive enough that every faint vibration, every pause and every slight change in texture seemed magnified. It was not merely a quiet concert; the audience’s restraint became part of the event.

The compositions unfolded slowly, with exquisite sensitivity to space. Sounds appeared almost hesitantly, like drops of rain falling onto parched earth, each leaving a delicate impression before dissolving into the surrounding quiet.

Nothing seemed accidental. A tiny sonic gesture could carry the weight of a whole phrase, and the intervals between sounds were as carefully shaped as the sounds themselves.

The atmosphere reminded me of entering an empty church – not necessarily in a religious sense, but through that mixture of reverence, tranquillity and sudden awareness of one’s own presence. We were listening collectively, almost afraid to disturb the delicate equilibrium taking shape in front of us.

And yet, beneath that fragility, there was considerable strength. The music possessed a quiet authority that needed neither volume nor theatrical gesture. Its power came from restraint, and from the confidence to leave a sound alone rather than immediately replace it with another.

A pause was never simply an absence. In a room this attentive, it created anticipation; the next faint tremor could arrive with more force than a loud impact might have had elsewhere that evening.

It was an ephemeral, profoundly moving experience, one that made silence feel almost tangible. Apoptose briefly altered the way I listened. I carried that heightened attention with me into the louder performances that followed.

Imminent

After Apoptose’s concentrated stillness, Imminent arrived like an electrical jolt.

Olivier Moreau has been exploring the relationship between industrial electronics and techno since the early 1990s. Working initially as Imminent Starvation, he became an important figure in the development of rhythmic noise, establishing a musical language in which distorted electronics and sophisticated programming coexist.

Vivid green lasers cut through the darkness in sharp geometric patterns while Moreau unleashed distorted beats, fractured sequences and densely interwoven electronics. The beams seemed to draw the music’s rhythmic architecture in mid-air: precise lines for rhythms that kept threatening to splinter.

That relationship between visual order and sonic instability was fascinating. The lasers suggested a disciplined grid; the sound repeatedly bent or disrupted the patterns your eyes expected to follow.

Imminent’s music thrives on the tension between strict programming and apparent disorder. Beats arrive with machine-like accuracy, then fracture or multiply; small details emerge from distortion before being absorbed by the next sequence. You can feel the discipline underneath even when the surface seems ready to break apart.

The momentum was irresistible. I found myself caught between following the intricacy of the programming and simply allowing the rhythms to take over. The green geometry overhead gave the music an unexpectedly lucid visual counterpart.

What made the set exciting was not just its force, but its agility: changes in density and timing kept the body moving while denying the ear the comfort of a predictable loop.

Flint Glass & Ah Cama-Sotz

Flint Glass and Ah Cama-Sotz are formidable artists in their own right, but seeing Gwenn Trémorin and Herman Klapholz together at WIF made the character of their collaboration much clearer to me. This was their first joint live performance, and it felt like a genuine meeting of two musical languages rather than one musician stepping into the other’s world.

Flint Glass brings an almost architectural precision to electronic music: intricate rhythmic patterns, sophisticated sound design and a talent for building tension through constantly changing textures. Ah Cama-Sotz approaches rhythm from a different direction, drawing on ritual percussion, dark ambient and hypnotic repetition. The interest lies in what happens when those instincts pull against one another.

They had already explored this meeting point on Wakan Tanka and 2026’s The Shadow of the Torturer. Onstage, however, the music acquired another vitality. Meticulously constructed sequences met a more instinctive, percussive force; neither swallowed the other.

Onstage, the collaboration was exhilarating. Precision and propulsion seemed to feed one another; the arrangements kept shifting shape even as their force carried the audience forward.

I kept noticing small shifts of emphasis: a rhythmic accent suddenly moved to the foreground, an atmospheric detail became the hinge between two passages, a dense structure opened just long enough to reveal the parts working inside it. The intelligence was in the movement, not in any display of complexity for its own sake.

Their individual identities remained recognisable, but the music belonged to both of them. Transitions between intricate electronic patterns and forceful percussive passages felt negotiated in real time, with neither sensibility reduced to a supporting role.

I loved the craft of it, and equally the sheer pleasure of experiencing that craft live. It is a satisfying thing to hear music built with such precision and still find yourself carried away by its momentum.

For me, it was one of Saturday’s finest performances: a collaboration that had clearly developed a language of its own.

N.U. Unruh & Meta Meat

Meta Meat have always fascinated me. Phil Von and Hugues Villette possess that rare ability to transform percussion, electronics, movement and theatrical expression into something profoundly physical, almost spiritual.

Their performances can be overwhelming in scale, but there is intimacy in the communication between them. Phil’s unmistakable movement language, rooted partly in flamenco, and Hugues’ commanding presence behind his elaborate percussion setup create a dialogue in which the body seems as important as any instrument.

Watching Phil move while Hugues works his magic with rhythms and electronics, I find myself completely hypnotised. Their interaction possesses an instinctive intelligence, a sense that the music is passing continuously between their bodies and instruments.

At Wrocław Industrial Festival, they joined forces with N.U. Unruh, co-founder and percussionist of Einstürzende Neubauten, for a collaboration created specifically for the anniversary edition.

Unruh’s decades of experimentation with unconventional instruments, metal objects and self-constructed percussion brought another, harder-edged vocabulary to an already elaborate world of rhythm and gesture.

The stage became an enormous organism of percussion, movement and sound. The array of instruments was impressive, but what held me was the exchange between the three musicians: one gesture seemed to trigger another, and every new impact altered the character of the whole.

Rhythms gathered, collided and evolved. Phil gave them a theatrical, deeply human expression through movement, while Hugues and Unruh tested their weight, resonance and mechanical possibilities. The music seemed to travel from instrument to body and back again.

There was something profoundly captivating about this combination of ceremonial gestures, mechanical precision and seemingly inexhaustible energy. The music reached me somewhere beneath conscious interpretation. I felt it in my stomach, my chest, my heartbeat. It stirred something instinctive, almost ancestral, creating an overwhelming connection between rhythm, body and emotion.

It was also immensely danceable, but not in the ordinary sense of following a beat. The rhythmic patterns were constantly being made visible: in a struck object, a lifted arm, a sudden movement, until the distinction between making music and moving to it began to dissolve.

The performers’ chemistry was central to it. Unruh did not simply add his industrial pedigree to Meta Meat’s performance; his inventiveness with materials entered into conversation with Phil and Hugues’ choreographic language. The collaboration had the urgency of people responding to one another, rather than performing three adjacent parts.

I was mesmerised by the physical scale of the performance and, even more, by the degree of musical communication taking place onstage. Every time I watch Phil and Hugues perform, I’m reminded how profoundly music can affect us when we stop trying to keep it at a comfortable distance. With N.U. Unruh, that sensation reached a new height. It was one of the defining experiences of my Saturday.

SPKtR / SPK

SPKtR was one of the performances I had been anticipating most, and it became one of my greatest highlights of the festival.

Graeme Revell’s return to the stage with the new incarnation of SPK was an extraordinary prospect. The project had appeared at Wave Gotik Treffen earlier this year, which I unfortunately missed, so seeing them in Wrocław was a priority from the moment the lineup was announced.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Robert J. Revell’s explosive solo performance on Friday had given me some idea of the territory we might be entering, but what he and his father created together went far beyond that introduction.

SPK occupies an important position in the history of industrial music. Founded in Sydney in 1978 by Graeme Revell and Neil Hill, the project helped establish an artistic language in which noise, electronics, performance art, political provocation and radical experimentation could operate together.

The contemporary incarnation developed by Graeme and Robert Revell continues that history while exploring the possibilities of modern sound technology.

At WIF, the performance was brutal, almost merciless in its intensity. Graeme, enclosed within a cage-like structure and surrounded by machinery, electronics and noise, appeared to be part of a spectacle designed to unsettle the familiar relationship between performer, instrument and audience.

The sound arrived in vast distorted masses, full of violent frequencies and relentless pressure. There was barely any room for comfortable listening. It felt like an assault on the ears, the nervous system and the notion that music ought to offer pleasure in any conventional sense. Yet somewhere within that violence I found an unsettling beauty – not despite the extremity, but because of how completely the performance committed to it.

There was no comfortable distance from which to observe it. I felt overwhelmed and, eventually, stopped trying to impose order on everything I was hearing. I let the distortion, aggression and sheer pressure of sound take over. Surrender can be a strange word to use about a concert, but it is the closest description I have for that experience.

I had felt something similar during Espectra Negra and Robert J. Revell, yet SPKtR operated on a different scale. What fascinated me was the way the sound seemed to leave no stable position for the listener: every time I thought I had adjusted to the pressure, its character changed again.

The visual dimension heightened that sense of captivity. Graeme’s cage-like structure, the machinery and the physical presence of the musicians formed an image of confinement that was hard to separate from the noise filling the room.

Beneath the violence there was compositional intention. Abrupt shifts in density and frequency gradually revealed a structure, though it did not offer the kind of resolution or reassurance one might expect from a conventional piece of music. Its logic became apparent through endurance rather than distance.

Perhaps the most extraordinary sensation came afterwards, when the noise finally stopped. Silence suddenly seemed impossibly delicate. It was as though the performance had altered my perception of sound itself, making me aware of its absence with an intensity I rarely experience.

I had waited a long time for this encounter. What Graeme and Robert presented was historically resonant, theatrically disturbing and physically overwhelming, but it was that sudden, almost fragile silence at the end that I carried away most vividly.

Saturday’s programme continued with DJ Blackdeath 1334, bringing the evening into its final hours.

Sunday, November 8

I couldn’t attend the final day, so this is a brief account of the programme rather than a review of performances I did not witness. Sunday turned its attention to contemporary Polish experimental music in Sala Witrażowa, with projects spanning abrasive electronics and audiovisual work.

Dystopian Control opened the evening with its exploration of noise, distorted electronics and experimental sound construction. The project’s artistic practice is also associated with the Negation Institute label and the organisation of events supporting experimental music. Its work draws on the relationship between improvisation, electronic composition and the physical properties of difficult sound materials.

Rites of Fall & Fugavit presented a collaboration between the music of Bartek Kuszewski and the audiovisual practice of Ernest Ziemianowicz. Rites of Fall explores atmospheric electronics, organic textures and heavier industrial structures, while Fugavit works with moving images and visual environments concerned with space and perception. Their collaborative project, Into the Well, treats sound and imagery as equally important elements of an audiovisual composition.

Mazut, the Polish duo formed by Michał Turowski and Paweł Starzec in 2015, has developed an unusual musical identity around noise, unconventional electronic instruments, acid-influenced rhythms and experimental dance music. Their fascination with inexpensive equipment, found recordings and deliberately rough textures has produced a catalogue that moves between playful experimentation and abrasive electronics. Their 2026 album Dirt Collector introduced slower, more spacious material while retaining the project’s characteristic interest in sonic imperfection.

The final live performance belonged to Opowieść, the Wrocław-based collective whose work combines noise, mechanical sound, visual performance and ritualistic elements. Their concerts often incorporate film projections, live visual actions and unconventional presentation methods, treating the performance as an audiovisual composition. Recordings including Opowieść, Zabobony and Podróż reflect the project’s fascination with movement, memory and the expressive possibilities of mechanical and environmental sound.

DJ Paradroid concluded the evening, bringing the four-day musical programme to an end.

Beyond the Concerts: Conversations, Encounters and Shared History

The anniversary programme also included a meeting with Alexander Hacke, who presented passages from his autobiography Blast!, tracing his experiences from Berlin’s underground scene through decades of musical experimentation and collaboration.

Hacke’s presence pointed towards the larger artistic history that runs through WIF. Industrial music has never existed in isolation from film, visual art, performance, literature or independent publishing; at its most interesting, it is a conversation between all of them.

The afterparties, with DJ Eric, Ancient Methods, Philipp Strobel, Blackdeath 1334 and Paradroid, carried those conversations into another musical register, from industrial techno to underground electronic club culture.

Together with Stefan Alt’s exhibition, these events made the anniversary feel larger than a sequence of concerts. There was space to revisit the scene’s history, but also to see how its different disciplines continue to intersect.

WIF’s programming shows considerable confidence in its audience. Historically important names share the bill with unfamiliar projects and collaborations assembled specifically for the event; there is little effort to smooth away the differences. Instead, the connections become audible as the days unfold, sometimes only after you have heard several artists who appear to have nothing in common.

That openness also shapes what happens outside the halls. People from different musical worlds strike up conversations, and friendships formed over the years have become part of the festival’s history in their own right.

For me, these encounters are inseparable from the music. Somewhere between changing lenses, moving from one performance to another and trying to take everything in, there were conversations I will remember for a long time, people I was genuinely happy to see again and unexpected meetings that became some of my favourite moments of the weekend.

Twenty-Five Editions Later

Returning to ordinary life after WIF has always felt rather strange. After days of music, constant movement, conversations, photography and a succession of impressions that scarcely leave time to process the last one, everyday routines seem to belong to another planet. The world carries on at its usual pace while your mind is still somewhere between a concert hall and a conversation you are not quite ready to let go of.

Then comes the work: sorting through photographs, revisiting performances, trying to translate everything into sentences. I often feel that language is an imperfect instrument for experiences of this intensity. I can explain a musical structure, describe a projection or identify why something affected me, but I cannot entirely reproduce the pressure of SPKtR’s noise, the delicate silence surrounding Apoptose, the imaginary temple of Empusae or the ridiculous happiness of discovering Crash Course in Science. Perhaps that gap is also what keeps me writing.

And then there are the people. A brief exchange between concerts, a conversation that becomes unexpectedly important, a familiar face you have not seen for years, a new friendship, a small act of kindness – none of these would necessarily belong in an ordinary concert report, yet they are part of what I take home from Wrocław.

Twenty-five editions have given me an enormous collection of memories. This anniversary added new ones while bringing old ones unexpectedly close: Stefan Alt’s photographs, the faces on the opening film, the recollection of those freezing early nights in Sala Gotycka. I could almost feel the cold again, though the festival around me now looked very different.

And still there is music I have yet to discover. After all these years I can enter a room knowing almost nothing about the artist and emerge with the excitement I felt when I first began exploring this scene. Crash Course in Science gave me that gift; SPKtR, Meta Meat and musicians whose work I already knew reminded me that familiarity need not diminish wonder.

For twenty-five editions, Maciek Frett, Arek Bagiński, Anna Frett and the Industrial Art team have done far more than bring international artists to Wrocław. They have sustained a place in which curiosity matters more than belonging to the right category, and where experiments that might seem too difficult, too quiet or too abrasive elsewhere can be heard seriously. That such a place has grown without losing its human scale is no small achievement.

I am deeply grateful to the organisers, the artists, everyone working behind the scenes and all the people whose presence made this anniversary so memorable. Looking through my photographs now, I see the concerts that will become part of WIF’s history, but also the faces, conversations and small moments that have entered my own. Twenty-five editions later, that is what remains most precious to me: not nostalgia for a festival as it once was, but the feeling that I can still come back, listen, meet people and be surprised.

Audience and atmosphere

About Wroclaw Industrial Festival

Wroclaw Industrial Festival (WIF) was founded in November 2001 by Maciej Frett and collaborators, who organised its first edition at La Fete, a club in a former German bunker beneath Wzgorze Partyzantow. The event grew out of Frett’s concert series “Mlodzi po stronie maszyn” (“Young People on the Side of Machines”), his work with Job Karma, and Arkadiusz Baginski’s independent film screenings in Wroclaw during the late 1990s. Early editions ran on a largely DIY basis out of Sala Gotycka before the festival expanded into its current multi-venue format spanning cinemas, galleries and concert halls across the city. The 2026 anniversary edition ran 5-8 November under the direction of Maciej Frett, Arek Baginski and Anna Frett, marking twenty-five years of programming centred on industrial, dark ambient, noise, experimental electronics, post-punk, neofolk and audiovisual performance.