May 21–23, 2026
Otto Wagner Areal & Filmcasino, Vienna

 

Hyperreality is an annual festival for experimental and electronic music in Vienna. On May 21 the festival will screen several films at the Filmcasino that contextualize the line‑up for May 22 and 23 at the Otto‑Wagner‑Areal.

Hyperreality Festival 2026

Reality is often framed as the opposite of staging — as what remains once the hype has passed. Club spaces have always unsettled this idea. On the dancefloor, perception and the sense of time begin to shift: repetition stretches the moment, bodies synchronize, intensities emerge and dissolve again. What remains are rarely clear narratives, but fragments — impressions, atmospheres, brief states of shared presence.

At the same time, club culture itself is not a stable ground. While parts of the scene are increasingly absorbed in global economies of attention, other spaces continue to emerge where music operates differently: not as entertainment or self-marketing, but as a way of organising social relations, enabling collective experience, and challenging existing hierarchies.

Hyperreality approaches electronic and experimental music in this sense — not as a finished work or fixed genre, but as a time-based, spatial and social practice. Music emerges in the moment, through the interplay of sound, architecture, duration and collective attention. The 2026 programme brings together artists who engage with these intersections formally, conceptually and aesthetically.

This year’s edition once again takes place at Otto Wagner Areal and expands into Filmcasino, adding a film programme that further contextualises the festival. Over three days, concerts, DJ sets, club nights, performances and screenings unfold across both venues. Rather than treating genres as stable categories, Hyperreality is interested in moments where musical orders begin to shift: when techno becomes texture, voices become rhythm, or performance reconfigures the dancefloor.

Tell me about reality

The visual language of this year’s edition revolves around a simple, recurring prompt:

Tell me reality is better than a dream.
Tell me the reality is better than the hype.
Tell me a reality is better than a memory.
Tell me: is it your first time in reality?

These phrases appear in the festival’s design like fragments of conversation. They don’t function as statements, but as open questions — lingering in the space. They point to a tension that has always shaped club culture: between expectation and experience, between the promise of a night and what actually unfolds.

The central motif reflects this shift. What initially appears as a banal space — a club bathroom — opens into something else: a scene where figures, texts and environments begin to overlap.

Bathrooms in clubs are often sites of interruption. While the dancefloor is structured by rhythm and movement, this is where pauses happen: waiting, catching breath, brief conversations, moments of being alone. At the same time, these spaces accumulate traces: on walls, mirrors or doors, notes, drawings, numbers and messages appear.

Over time, a layer of fragments emerges — an improvised archive of nightlife. Not an official memory, but a collection of fleeting marks: encounters, humour, desire, small gestures of care. Hyperreality 2026 approaches these spaces as thresholds — transitions between the everyday and the temporary realities that emerge within the club.

Reality today often appears as something produced — through images, platforms and narratives. Hyperreality is interested in another form of reality: one that emerges in the moment, through sound, bodies and shared time.

Sound as Situation

Electronic music today often circulates as an endless sequence of releases, tours and playlists. Tracks move faster than the spaces they are meant to inhabit, and scenes risk becoming aesthetic surfaces. At the same time, another practice persists — one that understands music not as product, but as situation.

This idea is not new. From minimalist composition to spiritual jazz and early club and soundsystem cultures, sound has repeatedly been conceived as a spatial experience: something that unfolds over duration, synchronizes bodies and produces collective states. This is precisely where the programme of Hyperreality 2026 positions itself, attempting an interdisciplinary positioning in the present.

Many works in the programme engage with repetition and duration. Artists such as Tony Njoku operate within this tension: between song form and experimental composition, between electronic production, voice and minimally informed instrumentation. Njoku’s recent work combines psychedelic synthesis, R&B, classical minimalism and club-adjacent rhythms into a music that is both introspective and spatial. Many of his compositions begin with a restored upright piano, which he extends through prepared techniques and intertwines with string arrangements and electronic textures.

The London-based trio Flur moves within a similar field.Centered around harpist Miriam Adefris, the group combines spiritually informed improvisation, ambient structures and free jazz traditions. The harp becomes a resonant body, over which saxophone and percussive movement unfold. In their combination of meditative repetition and improvisational openness, sonic spaces emerge that recall spiritual jazz as much as the experimental edges of electronic music — a line that also points back to figures such as Julius Eastman, whose radical approaches to repetition and duration continue to resonate in many forms of contemporary electronic music.

At Filmcasino, this perspective is extended through film. Joy Boy approaches Eastman’s life and work not as biography, but as an experimental reconstruction — combining archival material, performance and contemporary voices. The film foregrounds how deeply his practice was entangled with questions of identity, queerness and political visibility.

A contemporary extension of these questions can be found in the London-based platform and club series Inferno. Developed together with Lewis G. Burton, the Inferno showcase at Hyperreality brings a scene to Vienna that has become a key force within queer nightlife and alternative cultural infrastructures. Its influence extends beyond music into fashion, community and youth culture. The programme includes performances by Lewis G. Burton, Kavari (presenting her new EP PLAGUE on XL Recordings), Rent, Brother of Set, Wax Wings and ancious_t.

This perspective is further explored in the Austrian premiere of UNBOUND by PXKRW, which follows artists within the London, Inferno affiliated, club scene and traces the social dynamics from which such projects emerge — highlighting that club culture is not only made of tracks, but of networks, spaces and relationships.

Another approach to this practice appears in motionCHOSEN_inpractice* by amaeena. Working across film, performance and club culture, the piece shifts focus from structure to experience — to dance, intoxication and care as forms through which community emerges: temporary, ritualised and grounded in the present.

This connection between club, performance and political practice continues across other parts of the programme. With BULLYACHE, Hyperreality brings a London-based group to Vienna that operates at the intersection of live art, club culture and dance theatre. Their work intertwines music, choreography and performative staging into hyper-sensory collages. Their current production A Good Man Is Hard to Find, presented among others at the Venice Biennale Danza, combines Dmitri Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony with contemporary techno, interrogating the symbolic language of male power structures such as the American Bohemian Club. For Hyperreality, BULLYACHE present a music-driven iteration of their work — an overdriven mixture of guitar ballads, electronic fragments and performative energy, deliberately positioned between concert, club and performance.

SUUTOO’s work operates within a similar intersection. The multidisciplinary artist works with sound, text, visual elements and performance to construct their own mythological spaces. In projects such as STARFIRE — with the accompanying EP released on March 13 — electronic music, poetry and speculative narratives intertwine into a practice that moves between club, installation and performative world-building.

Cortisa Star engages with a similar deconstruction of formats. The rapper, performer and model combines aggressive rap flows over distorted club beats with autobiographical storytelling and an aesthetic that moves between pop, internet culture and underground scenes. In her tracks, raw rap structures meet melodic hooks and digital lo-fi sound worlds. At the same time, her work is closely tied to questions of visibility and identity: as a trans artist, Cortisa Star operates within a field still shaped by normative structures — and uses precisely this friction as a creative force. Together with Bapari, Subletvis, noorj and Zey b2b YEBO, Cortisa Star and SUUTOO form the Kitchen Floor on Saturday — a space between club, performance and experimental pop aesthetics.

Another part of Hyperreality turns more directly towards a bass driven club space. Artists such as Tom Boogizm, Mobbs x Susu Laroche and Grove x Ossia operate between established club structures and more open sonic forms. Tom Boogizm — producer, DJ and head of the label Shotta Tapes — combines dub, post-punk, blues and fragmented club rhythms into idiosyncratic collages that deliberately resist stylistic stability. Under his alias Rat Heart, he has released one of the most striking albums of the year.

Mobbs x Susu Laroche, also affiliated with the Modern Love label, work with a darker, hypnotic sonic language: trip-hop, shoegaze textures and dub-informed bass structures condense into a sound that builds dense, immersive atmospheres. Artists such as Grove, performing together with producer Ossia, combine dancehall, punk, jungle and experimental bass music into a sound that remains in constant motion. Many of their tracks emerge through direct interaction with the audience: Grove tests early versions of new material in the club, observing how rhythm translates into bodily movement. Projects such as the EP Queer + Black connect this club-centred energy with a clear positioning within Black and queer scenes.

Another form of intensity is introduced by Buttechno with his project X-berg dubs. The series combines raw techno structures with dub techniques and minimalist sound design, unfolding through repetition, pressure and spatial depth. This part of the programme is complemented by artists such as Fingers of God and Yves, whose sets move between hypnotic dub techno, experimental club music and atmospheric transitions. A more house-oriented perspective is brought in by Angel D’lite, Jorkes and jess_whereyouat, whose sets operate at the intersection of classic club traditions, contemporary house and open dancefloor energy.

Reality is never neutral

The realities that emerge within club spaces are rarely stable — and never the same for everyone. Nights don’t leave behind coherent memories, but fragments: images, sounds, fleeting sensations. In this sense, the club is less a space of escape than a shift in perception — a moment where other social and sensory possibilities briefly become tangible.

Or, as one of this year’s questions suggests:

Tell me, is a club a portal or only a pause,
a sideways time where we rehearse futures that evaporate at sunrise?

Hyperreality does not attempt to answer this question definitively.
Rather, the festival creates the conditions in which it can be experienced: through sound, space and collective listening.

For a few nights, reality becomes slightly more fluid.

Lineup:

Team: