DCF Cinema & Gothic Hall, Wroclaw, Poland16th - 19th October 2025
XXIV Wroclaw Industrial Festival Day 1 with Job Karma
October arrived in Wroclaw draped in fog and restless light - a month that already felt like a prelude to something ceremonial. This year, the XXIV Wroclaw Industrial Festival unfolded not as a series of concerts, but as a single living entity: pulsing, mutating, and feeding on electricity.
For four nights, the city became a resonant body of its own - the Gothic Hall, DCF Cinema, and Sala Witrażowa each acting as a different chamber of this vast mechanical heart. The festival’s spirit remained what it has always been: uncompromising, visionary, rooted in both decay and renewal. Sound became scripture, light became confession.
The 2025 edition was defined by polarity - technology and tenderness, ceremony and rebellion, minimalism and chaos. Artists turned machinery into emotion, objects into oracles, and silence into tension. The audience didn’t merely watch; it participated, absorbed, endured. Each performance was a form of inquiry - not into Industrial Music as a genre, but as a state of consciousness. Once again, Wroclaw proved that this festival is not about nostalgia. It’s about survival.
The opening night at DCF belonged to JOB KARMA, the festival’s founders and still its most accurate mirror. Under Arkadiusz Bagiński’s towering visuals, their set unfolded like slow-motion cinema: tactile analogue pulses, ghostly samples, and deep bass currents shaping the air into something almost architectural. More than a concert, it felt like the system being switched back on - a reminder that this festival was built on the idea of sound as history, critique, and atmosphere at once.
Job Karma
Formed in the late 1990s by Maciek Frett and Aureliusz Pisarzewski, joined by visual artist Arkadiusz Bagiński, JOB KARMA are a cornerstone of the Polish Industrial and Post-Ambient scene. Combining analogue electronics, field recordings, and cinematic visuals, they transform social and historical reflection into immersive audiovisual experiences. Their performances bridge sound art and political commentary, defining the very spirit of the Wroclaw Industrial Festival they helped to create.
Music & Performance
XXIV WIF is officially open - and with a thunderclap. Who better to ignite the festival than its own architects, JOB KARMA: Maciek Frett, Aureliusz Pisarzewski, and visual alchemist Arkadiusz “Bago” Bagiński. The trio are more than stalwarts; they’re the project around which this festival’s DNA first crystallised, and their return to inaugurate the 2025 edition felt like both a homecoming and a statement of intent. DCF Cinema’s vast screen became a second stage, and the hall itself turned into an instrument.
I’ve always felt that JOB KARMA understand scale in a way few others do: how to make a single frequency feel like architecture, how to let an image unfurl until it becomes an atmosphere you can walk into. Their concerts aren’t just performances; they are immersive installations, audiovisual compositions where sound and image exist in precise tension. What unfolded before us was a living grammar of industrial process, of echoes and fragments, of the slow electricity of history turning into light.
That sound - that unmistakable machine-heart of JOB KARMA - struck with the familiarity of something almost sacred. Their hybrid of tactile analogue and digital synthesis, of trance-like pulses and ghostly samples, creates a kind of sonic archaeology. I could hear found voices, distorted transmissions, the hum of systems collapsing into rhythm. It’s not noise for the sake of impact, but a carefully designed dramaturgy of pressure and release, a conversation between mechanism and emotion.
What I love about their work is that they make systems audible: energy, control, ideology, and then they ask us to search within those structures for the fragile human pulse that still beats underneath. The set moved like a film unspooling in slow motion. It began with a tense, almost architectural restraint - the sound measured, deliberate, ominous. Then came a middle section that widened the field: the bass felt like weather rolling across the body, while the percussion carved out sharper perspectives.
The closing movement was all light and gravity, expanding into something nearly elegiac. That balance - between hypnosis and propulsion, between stillness and drive - is their signature. Just when you think you’ve settled into repetition, a new tone emerges from the deep, and the whole space tilts. You don’t applaud between songs; you come up for air between movements.
And then there were the images. Arek Bagiński’s visuals are never illustrative - they’re elemental. Layers of industrial landscapes, textures of rust and circuitry, forgotten infrastructures flickering like x-rays of a civilisation under the skin of the present. On DCF’s enormous canvas, these images acquired a geological gravity; each cut landed like the opening of a gate in a vast machine cycle. The visuals didn’t decorate the music - they conducted it.
Together, sound and image became a dialogue of materials, each shaping and reshaping the other in real time. It meant something profound that WIF 2025 opened here, in Wroclaw, with JOB KARMA. They are woven into the DNA of this city and of this festival. Since their beginnings in the late 1990s, they’ve stood at the intersection of art, technology, and political reflection, giving the Polish industrial scene its own distinct vocabulary. I could feel that history in the pacing of the set, in the way they allowed silence to occupy the room, in how confidently they shaped dynamics at cinematic scale.
When the crowd recognised familiar textures - those signature JOB KARMA frequencies - it was like hearing an old friend’s voice in a crowd. What makes JOB KARMA endure, at least for me, is their philosophy. They never treat “industrial” as a pose or an aesthetic shell. For them, it’s a method - a way of revealing what technology does to us and how we respond to it. They counterweight the coldness of machines with presence and intention: Maciek Frett’s compositional precision, Aureliusz Pisarzewski’s beautifully restrained programming, and Bagiński’s mercilessly poetic imagery.
The result is impact without bombast, intellect without distance, ritual without nostalgia. As opening gestures go, this was absolute. A reminder that Wroclaw Industrial Festival is not just another date in the calendar, but an ongoing conversation between art and reality - and that JOB KARMA remain among the very few who can make that conversation audible, visible, and necessary, all in a single breath.
Setlist
01. March
02. Man in my room
03. Relativity
04. Hydroxizinum city
05. November
06. Ecce homo
All Pictures by Karo Kratochwil
