Posted October 05, 2017 06:52:36

Photo: The first Unsound festival was held more than a decade ago in Krakow. (Supplied)

It's music for the post-truth age: original, unsettling, uncertain of itself, at times ambient and fleeting, at others jarring, spikey and playful.

Experimental electronic music inhabits the backwaters of pop culture, and is largely produced by underground artists who have obtained hidden but devoted fanbases.

It shares certain aspects with more popular variants such as trance, techno and house, but is also partly a reaction against them.

"It's a world of its own. It has a gigantic following," former Adelaide Festival director David Sefton said.

"Often in Australia what you get is the more commercial, mainstream dance music festivals and what Australia hasn't really had before is something like this, which is about the more interesting and more experimental end of electronic music."

Mr Sefton is referring to Unsound Adelaide, a musical event that was previously part of the Adelaide Festival but will be held as a standalone festival in the city for the first time in November.

The Unsound idea originated in Krakow in Poland. The first Unsound festival was held there more than a decade ago, and the event has since spread to other parts of the globe.

Mr Sefton, who is the artistic director of Unsound Adelaide, said a good way to describe it was as an electronic equivalent to WOMADelaide.

"To actually bring together this body of the most interesting artists in this world into one place at one time is something that really doesn't happen anywhere else on this continent," he said.

The main musical acts will perform in the Thebarton Theatre, while there will also be a sound art exhibition in the Botanic Garden greenhouse and a series of talks at UniSA's Hawke Centre.

Mr Sefton said he noticed a strong appetite for electronic music when he was directing the Adelaide Festival.

"This is one of the things that Unsound is famous for — you get to see people before they become spectacularly famous," he said.

"People have waited long to see people like Holly Herndon and Pharmakon and even the fabulously named Senor Coconut.

"Holly Herndon was most recently seen as the opening special guest for Radiohead on their last major tour. These are people who are quite used to playing stadiums."

Unsound Adelaide will run from November 16 to 19.

Topics: electronic, dance-music, music, carnivals-and-festivals, events, arts-and-entertainment, sa, adelaide-5000