DCF Cinema & Gothic Hall, Wroclaw, Poland16th to 19th October 2025
XXIV Wroclaw Industrial Festival Day 3 with Slow Slow Loris, Heimstatt Yipotash, Test Dept, Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, Mono No Aware
Saturday held the festival’s emotional centre. SLOW SLOW LORIS opened with a performance as delicate as it was intense - hushed drones, whispered vocals, and small electronic fractures that felt like listening to someone’s dreams in real time. HEIMSTATT YIPOTASH then flipped the equation with intricate rhythmic architecture and relentless momentum, finally bringing many in the audience fully into motion.
TEST DEPT followed with the night’s most confrontational statement: metal, voice, and visuals colliding into a piece that felt closer to political theatre than to traditional live music. It demanded attention rather than asking for it. ORDO ROSARIUS EQUILIBRIO closed the main programme with a carefully staged liturgy of acoustic guitars, strings and symbol-laden lyrics - a slow-burn set suspended between desire, devotion and decadence. MONO NO AWARE then transformed the hall into pure kinetic force, its complex, technoid patterns pushing the crowd into that rare kind of collective trance where rhythm takes over thought.
Slow Slow Loris
Berlin-based duo SLOW SLOW LORIS, composed of Ana and G6PD, explore the borderland between Noise, Ambient, and performance art. Their sound blends fragile drones, whispered vocals, and textured electronics, creating an atmosphere of intimacy and dreamlike tension. Known for their subtle yet emotionally charged performances, they transform fragility into strength through sound and silence.
Music & Performance
Berlin-based duo - Ana and G6PD - appeared like silhouettes in a fog of dim blue light, crafting a sound that hovered between drone, melody, and memory. Their performance was poetry in vibration: delicate yet intense, as though every note was a secret revealed in slow motion. SLOW SLOW LORIS blur the boundary between noise and tenderness. Their sound is a creature of fragile beauty - layers of drone, whispered voices, broken harmonies, and textures that shimmer like static-laced lullabies. It’s music that feels both tactile and ephemeral, as if it might dissolve if you listen too closely.
Their Wroclaw performance was a rare alignment of emotional and sonic precision. You could sense the dialogue between them - every tone a question, every resonance an answer. It was experimental music that refused to be sterile, alive with human vulnerability and warmth. There were moments when it felt almost too intimate to witness, as though we had stumbled into someone’s private ritual of sound. The audience was entranced, swaying gently, absorbed in the quiet storm unfolding before them.
When the final frequency faded, what remained was not emptiness, but a strange, luminous peace. The project offered one of the most poetic and sonically beautiful experiences of the entire festival - proof that fragility, when performed with courage, can be the strongest force of all.
Setlist
01. Endless sympathy makes symphonies appear
02. Delicate storm, delicate being
03. Bad memory, clever dream
04. In broad light
05. Angel, so far
Heimstatt Yipotash
HEIMSTATT YIPOTASH, formed by Arnte and Synthetik Form in 2001, stand for intricate rhythm architecture and sonic confrontation. Combining harsh electronics, breakbeats, and cinematic layering, their music balances aggression with intellect. Signed to Hands Productions, the duo’s performances are structured yet explosive - merging industrial tension with irresistible movement.
Music & Performance
It was their first show in Wroclaw and what a debut it was. HEIMSTATT YIPOTASH stormed the stage with a performance that felt both raw and meticulously controlled, a thrilling fusion of aggression and precision that hit like a perfectly aimed electric charge. From the very first second, the duo commanded the Gothic Hall with sheer presence. Their sound was muscular yet deliberate, a dynamic architecture built from metallic textures, pulsating basslines, and layers that seemed to breathe with their own mechanical rhythm.
Every beat landed with purpose, every sound detail locked in place with almost surgical accuracy, and yet the overall effect was pure fire.They managed to create something rare: a sound that was confrontational and danceable at once. The industrial density, sharp-edged synths, and relentless energy were tempered by moments of clarity, sudden shifts that made the crowd erupt in movement. It was a set of pure physicality and tension, a dialogue between machine and instinct.
HEIMSTATT YIPOTASH’s Wroclaw premiere felt like both an arrival and a statement - proof that power doesn’t need chaos to feel alive. A brilliant balance of control and release, intellect and impact. I asked for a strong, danceable set, and they delivered beyond expectations - fierce, dynamic, and powerful.
Setlist
01. Hadal
02. Silicon syndicate
03. Maelstrom
04. Perdition
05. Abyss
06. Sable
07. Belt to blender
08. Swarm hunt
09. Cornucopia
Test Dept
Founded in South London in 1981, TEST DEPT remain one of Industrial music’s most politically charged and artistically ambitious collectives. Using metal percussion, found objects, and multimedia installations, they forged a language of protest and transformation. Their sound - part rhythm, part resistance - embodies industrial culture’s activist roots while confronting modern social and political structures with unflinching intensity.
Music & Performance
Some performances don’t just happen. They unfold like a revelation, dismantling everything you thought a concert could be. The Saturday headliner of XXIV Wroclaw Industrial Festival, TEST DEPT, offered precisely that: not entertainment, but an encounter. Earlier that day, during their Q&A session, they spoke with sharp, lucid honesty; by night, those ideas materialised in sound, transformed into something fierce, physical, and transcendent. Their music has always been as powerful as it is demanding.
It isn’t an easy pleasure; it’s a structure you must enter fully - with your senses, intellect, and nerves - to begin to understand its intricacies and irregularities. Every rupture, distortion, and rhythmic fracture serves intention. Their sound operates like a system of pressure and release, a sonic architecture of resistance. They disarm you by refusing predictability. There are no simple danceable lines to follow; instead, what they create feels like an orchestrated spectacle - a theatre of sound and voice, where metal, breath, and protest collide. It’s an art form closer to performance or abstract painting than conventional concert.
You move through it the way you move through an expressionist canvas, guided by emotion, disoriented by beauty, cut open by truth. Every sound, every scream feels ripped from living flesh; the cry of something painfully human beneath the machinery. It’s a scream that becomes a statement, a howl that becomes structure. The stage becomes an animated canvas where art transforms the unbearable weight of emotion into a kind of sacred release. And still, between those waves of sonic intensity, there are moments when rhythm takes hold, propulsive, unstoppable, and rawly physical.
TEST DEPT remind us that intellect and instinct are not opposites but parts of the same current. Their music doesn’t invite you to dance; it summons you to engage - to feel, to think, to confront. Their show at WIF was monumental: not a set, but a living sculpture of sound and light, music as a force of change - uncomfortable, but necessary.
Setlist
01. Things fall apart
02. Current Affairs
03. Info scare
04. Landlord
05. Slave to an ism
06. Fall from light
07. Gatekeeper
08. Crusher
09. Full Spectrum
10. Dominance
11. Fragmentation
12. Eternal
Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio
Formed in 1993 by Tomas Pettersson, joined by Rose-Marie Larsen, ORDO ROSARIUS EQUILIBRIO bridge Apocalyptic Folk, Dark Cabaret, and Ritual Pop. Their art meditates on duality - creation and destruction, love and death - through acoustic guitars, orchestral textures, and provocative lyrics. With a visual and sonic language steeped in symbolism, they remain one of the most influential and elegant acts in post-industrial music.
Music & Performance
There are concerts you attend, and there are rituals you enter. The performance by ORDO ROSARIUS EQUILIBRIO belonged unmistakably to the latter. For over thirty years, Tomas Pettersson and Rose-Marie Larsen have explored the liminal space between creation and destruction, devotion and desire, constructing a mythology that feels both ancient and modern. Their appearance in Wroclaw was a masterpiece of poetics and provocation.
Dressed in a palette of shadows and dim light, the duo moved like figures from a dream - deliberate, distant, yet achingly human. Acoustic guitars intertwined with deep strings and ritual percussion - slow, echoing, almost heartbeat-like - while Tomas’s voice carried both intimacy and command. But what truly defined the night was the atmosphere: heavy with symbolism, charged with sensual tension, and illuminated by the unmistakable intelligence of their craft.
Their songs are constellations of contradictions - tenderness and cruelty, purity and sin - and hearing them live feels like being invited into a secret order, bound not by doctrine but by feeling. As the music unfolded, it became clear that ORDO ROSARIUS EQUILIBRIO’s art extends beyond sound. It’s an aesthetic language of its own, one that speaks through gesture, silence, and suggestion. Their concerts aren’t just musical events; they are acts of becoming.
The audience didn’t simply listen, they partook, becoming part of the ceremony. When it ended, the silence that followed felt almost sacred.
Setlist
01. Nature seeking equilibrium
02. Receive the flame
03. I am the son of daggers
04. Do angels never cry and heaven never fall?
05. How I paint the world in flames 4 you
06. Social darwinist contortion - who is born to rule the world?
07. Lost forever in the blitzkrieg of roses
08. White were the stains and paraphilia was her name
09. To the gods that kill and forever will
10. Hell is where the heart is - the gospel of Tomas
11. Imbecile, my idiot lover
12. Ménage à troi - there is nothing to regret Three is an orgy, four is forever
Mono No Aware
The rhythmic-industrial project of Leif Künzel, MONO NO AWARE was founded in 1995 and became one of the defining names on the Hands Productions roster. Known for complex, technoid structures and hypnotic polyrhythms, the project merges mechanical precision with meditative power. Each performance becomes an act of change where control, chaos, and energy converge into pure kinetic force.
Music & Performance
Some concerts hit with precision, others with emotion - and then there are those that strike like a physical force, bypassing thought altogether. MONO NO AWARE’s show at this year’s Wroclaw Industrial Festival was exactly that: a sonic detonation that felt like a kick to the solar plexus, pure voltage coursing through the air. Founded by Leif Künzel three decades ago, MONO NO AWARE has always operated at the intersection of control and chaos - a masterclass in rhythm sculpture, where complex, technoid structures are built and deconstructed in real time.
What unfolded in the Gothic Hall was less a setlist than a sequence of passages: brutal, elegant, and utterly consuming. The basslines rolled like thunder trapped beneath the floor, while layered beats erupted into walls of polyrhythmic tension. Künzel performed with total immersion, his movements sharp, precise, almost ceremonial - as if conducting invisible machinery. The audience didn’t so much dance as surrender, bodies moving instinctively to something primal and beautifully mechanical.
It was one of those rare moments when industrial sound transcends genre, becoming pure energy. Each sequence crashed and dissolved like waves of molten metal, leaving behind silence that felt charged and alive. MONO NO AWARE proved once again that rhythm can be revelation - an ecstatic machinery of emotion and intellect fused in perfect balance. It wasn’t merely powerful; it was purifying.
All Pictures by Karo Kratochwil
