Some tired thoughts on Unsafe+Sounds

So, not to be pretentious but I’m going to take it from this year’s festival motto, “the level sunlight still warms walls.” I liked this a lot when I first saw it, it feels like a direct response to struggling with hopelessness in a world where every month the odds seem more stacked against us - which by the way, and I’m basically just cluelessly yapping but hey, I don’t necessarily think is correct in all the ways - climate wise it probably is and this is probably the worst truth of it but societally I’m afraid that in a country like Austria many of us still have to see things get worse closer to home before we wake up more. Anyways. But my music listening experience is super dependent on current mood and outlook on life, so when I started listening a bit recently, many (definitely not all, see Earth Ball, Isabella Forciniti, Saint Abdullah & Eomac, …) of the acts so far announced struck me as oscillating between, depending on perspective, nourishingly tender and weakeningly depressive. This is probably not a very enlightening perspective, from someone who doesn’t practice music herself and currently often avoids listening to sad music to, well, not get too sad, but I guess I can’t help looking at things from within myself. In any case, it’s interesting that Shilla Strelka who I think mainly curates the festival(?) also specifically wrote that this edition is going to be “less confrontational than in recent years”. I guess I just want to leave it at the question of whether this has any substantial connection to political thinking about what has been changing in the past years or whether this is a more personal curatorial choice. Is this the time to focus less on rage and more on turning inwards? None of which would say infinitely much about the quality of the music being played, which we seem set to get more deeply into in two weeks, when a) I get my head out my ass and into my ears, and b) my comrades with different and sometimes more emotionally stable perspectives will also be contributing to this little project that I surprised them with a day ago :)