music austria – music information centre austria

Stories about artists who stay almost unnoticed in their home country and yet enjoy extraordinary fame on the international market are rare. The sad news of the early, cancer-related death of Peter Rauhofer ends the story of a life with such a path. Born in Vienna in 1965, the biography begins with a man who is dedicated to music at a very early age. Work at a record store was soon followed by the first DJ gig and an eight-year career as an A&R director of the record label GIG Records, which was founded by Markus Spiegel and also had Falco under contract. Throughout his career, the turntables stayed his trusty companions.

In the years since 2000 Austrian electronic musicians were not as omnipresent as in the previous decade. However there were still a lot of exciting approaches and developments. A brief overview by Sebastian Fasthuber.

You could probably write a whole book about the Austrian electronic music scene since 2000. However, summarizing this in a few paragraphs seems to be impossible. Or is it? The longer you think about what happened in terms of sounds and scenes, after the “Vienna Sound”-hype of 1996/97 and the following few years of its significant impact finally died away, it becomes all the more appealing to list a few points and keywords and write down some names that were formative and/or new in the millennium years. Without any claim to completeness.

Daniel Riegler is one of the founders of the Jazz Workshop in Vienna, from which many fantastic and notable projects and bands have been born. The 20 piece ensemble “Studio Dan” (named after the 1978 Frank Zappa release) was formed in 2005 with the intention to bring something new and even “bigger” to life, and so Riegler began to organize a band of musicians around him to suite the project. The interplay between musicians was an important and deciding factor in the overall decision making process, since Riegler was interested in having an intimate interplay between the musicians, and not just another ground of seasoned, and estranged, professionals. The band spends countless hours practicing, traveling and playing concerts and Rigeler was dedicate to not following the practice of most big bands. In his own words, “It isn’t enough to just call someone and ask if they can jump in and play for the night….normally big bands fill the instrument slot with whoever can play that night, and I wanted to get away from that tradition, even if it isn’t always possible to prevent it.”

Some bands have such an incredible mixture of styles, a melding of every possible genre into one distinctive blend of sounds which meld into a unique musical expression. The uninitiated should picture an extremely exact and precise group of musicians, who fit all the seemingly wrong pieces and gears of a totality which combines to a perfect homogenous whole. The Merry Poppins are such a band, hailing from Salzburg, and raised in the pop culture of the Postmodern, for them the fight between genres is already decided and played out, and they have taken the combinality and equality of the genres, which emerged out of the revolutionary sentiment o fthe 1990s with a shrug.