“POP is, first and foremost, the sound of opening a bottle, provided it is heavily carbonated.”
Gero Günther – ‚Countdown to TXTC (Want-You-Version)’
Blessings and Curses of Outdoor Festivals: They’re outdoor, so you may not get Omicron 5 and can move more freely through the crowd. However, you also stand in the rain when it rains, like on this Friday followingnoon. As a result, on the one hand, the opener act of the Seebühne Xing before a few people once morest masses of water from above and furthermore the daily ambient dose of pop festival veteran Wolfgang Möstl aka Lehmann with his community project Future Travel Moved from outside to inside Club U, to sometime later. It was said to be very good, but you might be on your way from the main stage (Crack Iganz) to the secret stage (Factory) and miss everything once more. Hard festival life.
So don’t follow the arrows to the back entrance of the artists’ house, because there aren’t any, to the glass door at the back of the former Brut and see the exhibition of the so-called vinyl postcards as well as the magic machine called Vinylograph in action. Every day, various artists (Thursday: STSK, Friday: Farce, Saturday: Katharina Ernst) host the Vinylograph Sessions, where fellow artists either make music, perform, improvise or even write music in the first place, either at the same time and together or one following the other, in front of an audience in the exhibition space , and this music is then scratched live into exclusive singles records. It’s downright magical. (In normal life outside of Popfest, you can visit the predecessor of this vinylograph at the wonderful Art Space SSTR6 at Schönbrunnerstraße 6 in Vienna).
Work out on Popfest Friday Farce and her guest Sakura (Anthea has canceled) in the Künstlerhaus Factory between the exhibition objects – playable sound-image postcards – just a common track, which is alternately exciting and a little tedious to look at, but the better the mechanisms, backgrounds and above all: the small-scale work(! ) shows who is behind everything that happens at the Popfest in concentrated form over four days and nights.
“Pop is a system made of sugar”
Philip L’Heritier
As is well known, the three letters P, O, P are interpreted in many different ways by the curatorial teams at the Popfest, depending on the genre and each year in very different ways. Of course, the term goes beyond music. Pop is hard work and often also: precariat. A game of chance, a commitment to self-exploitation, a hope for contacts, the right time in the right place, but above all pop is not a one-man business, but a small-scale mechanism made up of many, many movements, carried out by many different people, until at some point 2 minutes 30 in come out of the speaker in their compact, final form, and someone has to listen to them. This song might be your life.
Pop is above all community, and this is particularly noticeable on the second Popfest day in 2022, for example when the Viennese hip-hop veteran is on the lake stage Kamp his sympathetic misfit anthems with the loyal fans of back then shares (in pop terms, a small eternity since his acclaimed album “Versager ohne Zukunft” from 13 years ago.) Kamp bravely ignores the bells of the Karlskirche, which actually ring incessantly during his set, which the audience can only acoustically hide directly in front of the stage , while at every other place on Karlsplatz you are slowly being rung in the direction of madness. Turns out, the bells are broken and the fire brigade has to turn off the power to the church following regarding 35 minutes, i.e. almost the entire set of Kamp, or something. Kamp carries it with composure „call it a Kamp-Back“ (© Stefan Trischler).
The Salzburg cloud rap pioneer also has the backup of his own gang Crack Ignaz in one of his first shows in five years – apart and now somehow gently distant; the new songs regarding daggers and blood haven’t really caught on yet – as well as the pop festival-tested sibling duo EsRAPwho the slot of the unfortunately ill Ebow have taken over. “Where are my Tschuschen?” Esra, the rapper and curator who has just been curated, keeps asking, and the answer comes loudly from many mouths.
EsRAP present themselves more beat-heavy and tighter than ever. As was the case last year, the Gasmac-Gilmore collab “Freundeseits” is a highlight of the evening and, in terms of content, also stands for the sense of community that festivals like this convey: “You have a privilege, I have friends with me. You’ve got Ibiza, I’ve got the video with me, I’ve got Tschuschen with me, I’ve got Vienna with me, I’ve got OTK with me, I’ve got you with me.” That’s exactly what it’s regarding. “You have everything but nothing with you.”
The booking of the Manchester-via-Vienna tried and tested club music high-flyer salute as the closing act on the lake stage proves to be a curatorial stroke of genius, because Felix Nyajo transforms the square in front of the pond, perhaps for the first time in this form at the pop festival, into a real, large, euphoric dance floor. Salute mixes their own hits like “Jennifer” with hits like, yes really, “Music sounds better with you” (Stardust, remember?). The Friday audience, who had been hesitant for a long time, is finally thawing, and it’s now warm and dry at Karlsplatz.
Inside the Prechtlsaal, the stage has moved from one room to the middle in this strangely bright, reverberant tube, a very good idea. The synthesizer specialist Connie Frischauf plays them with the most refreshing, airy, elastic Krautpop that one can only imagine. Her song pearls, filtered in a strictly analogue way from magic boxes, lack any conceptual heaviness; Conny Frischauf even turns the climate crisis into cloudy ideas without false promises: “We’re burning up like a sheet of paper.” Her set is probably the highlight of the pop festival so far.
As a result, the night gets a little tricky. The courtyard of the TU, which is currently being renovated, has shrunk to a small passageway made up of dixie toilets and a bar, the friendly Popfest security staff have to patiently explain the way to the new location Ella-Briggs-Saal over and over once more and at the same time guide crowds safely through the eye of a needle made of barriers and guide passages. So you stand in line for a long time to get off the set of Earl Mobley unfortunately only the very last three tones can be heard. Big cheers from those who arrived earlier.
Patrick Wally
Ash Night
So back to the Prechtlsaal, but there is silence there at the moment. The noise musician Ash Night would actually have chosen her poppiest, most beat-heavy pieces for her set, but following only 20 minutes there is apparently a power failure on stage; the further course of the show is not entirely clear. The poor. If you are now moving towards Ella Briggs once more, you should definitely make a detour to the blue plastic boxes beforehand, because there are apparently no toilets at the back, which rightly causes a little frustration for some visitors following a long queue.
healing and consolation Liz Metta. The Austrian-American musician performs her wonderfully light as a feather, dream-lost psychedelic pop so suddenly, as if she were just imagining it at that moment. At the back of the hall, as is so often the case at the pop festival, people are talking loudly, and at some point someone comes to the light switch and bathes us in white neon light. We have Liz Metta’s unexcited grace to thank for the fact that everything is still shrouded in pastel-colored fog and that the room floats through the night like a safe-space capsule; for many (besides Ernst Lima from the previous evening) THE discovery so far from the carefully curated pop festival program by Andreas Spechtl and Dalia Ahmed. It feels just right. The performances of Radian, Jung and Tagen, Zinn must be sacrificed to sleep with a heavy heart. The rain is supposed to stop later today.
Patrick Wally
Andreas Spechtl & Dalia Ahmed
