More pop festival than ever

Four days and nights of pop on Karlsplatz

The Seebühne will once again be the heart of the Pop Festival this year. However, there are now five other venues.

(Bild: Franz Reiterer)

50 new discoveries and stars of the scene will once again be joining forces for four days and nights at Popfest on Vienna's Karlsplatz at the end of July. Tried and tested venues return - such as the Wien Museum as a venue - and the organizers have also come up with a few new ideas.

In its 15th edition, the pop festival on Karlsplatz returns to its old form from 25 to 28 July: following its reopening, the Wien Museum will once again be the venue for a total of over 50 program items, alongside the Seebühne, TU, Club U and Karlskirche. The concerts at the Wien Museum show what can be "pop" here: The focus here is on exciting new interpretations of the Viennese song tradition.

Indie on the tuba
The "Hochzeitskapelle", which represents the acoustic side of indie heroes Notwist, will be performing at the Wien Museum. Instead of the electric bass, Micha Acher will be playing the tuba. Vienna Museum Director Matti Bunzl proudly pointed out at the presentation of the festival program that the first public appearance of the current star Voodoo Jürgens once took place in his house as part of the Pop Festival. For this year's program - curated by FM4 Soundpark mastermind Lisa Schneider and Attwenger half Markus Binder - Bunzl said: "The acts are extremely awesome."

Lisa Schneider and Markus Binder are responsible for the program selection in 2024.

(Bild: Ingo Pertramer)

Drawer with a colorful mix of content
But on the main stage and elsewhere, the "pop" drawer also contains everything from punk to indie and more, right from the first evening: the festival will be opened by local hero Nino from Vienna, who laid one of the foundations of his career at the first pop festival 14 years ago, followed by the punky Anda Morts, the avowedly pop Verifiziert and young star Oskar Haag. Instead of red lines and concepts, curator Schneider relies on the only true pop festival tradition: "People come, enjoy the summer evening, listen and get a cold drink."

Pop stars as movie stars

New this year is a festival warm-up in the Stadtkino from 22 to 24 July, where this year's trend of pop stars as actors in local films will be honored: Voodoo Jürgens in "Rickerl", Oskar Haag in "Sleeping with a Tiger" and Anja Plaschg (Soap&Skin) in "The Devil's Bath". Each evening, the program consists of a live talk with the stars, the film screening and then a recorded concert by the respective artists at Popfest.

"Dancing and celebrating together"
For Vienna's City Councillor for Culture Veronica Kaup-Hasler, the great unifying aspect of Popfest is that it remains free of charge. With this "invitation to dance and celebrate together", the city is "promoting the cultural participation of everyone living in Vienna and creating shared experiences". In times in which the "spaces for opinions and discourse are becoming ever narrower", it is all the more important to "keep spaces open", both in the real and figurative sense.

Things you can't hear anywhere else
However, Popfest, which has itself become a brand, offers more than "just" good acts from Austria and the surrounding area that you can listen to for free for a change. Last but not least, Popfest patrons Gabriela Hegedüs, Christoph Möderndorfer and Robert Rotifer, who continue to act as gray eminences, ensure that there are performances that cannot be found anywhere else: this year, for example, with Wolfgang Möstl & The Friends: Behind the friends are all those well-known musicians whose work Möstl - often under a different name - had a hand in. Half of the Austro-music scene will share the stage, a "small pop festival within a pop festival", as Schneider puts it.

"Pretty incredible" Vienna
To ensure that those musicians who still want to fine-tune their acts or have simply not yet caught the attention of the curators and organizers get something out of the festival, there will once again be two workshops on Friday, this time on production and a songwriting project, as well as two discussion panels, one on the past and future of punk and one on the influence of media digitization on music. The audience, on the other hand, need not fear that the Popfest organizers will run out of ideas. Music journalist Rotifer said that there is "new and exciting music in Austria every year, and that will continue to be the case for the next 15 years". Curator Binder agreed: "A new band every week - Vienna is pretty incredible in that respect."