HYPERREALITY FESTIVAL 2025: Do you believe in reality?
May 23 & 24, 2025 | Otto-Wagner-Areal, Vienna

Hyperreality is an annual festival for experimental and electronic music, taking place in an off-location in Vienna. For the 2025 edition, the festival returns to the Otto Wagner Areal, transforming the former industrial kitchen into a festival venue on May 23rd and 24th.

Do You Believe in Reality?

In an era where images, narratives, and identities are algorithmically curated, the question of reality takes on a new urgency: What do we see—and what part of it is true? What we are shown online shapes not only what we believe, but how we come to believe.The term hyperreality describes a world in which the boundaries between representation and reality have collapsed. Simulations appear more real than reality itself; the difference between original and copy becomes irrelevant. In this hyperreal landscape everything can seem real—and yet everything is merely representation.

Hyperreality is therefore not just a festival, but a question: What common ground remains when everyone lives in their own reality? The philosophical discourse of representationalism reminds us that we never experience reality directly, but only through signs, language, and symbols—through representations. But these representations are not neutral: they are shaped by power structures, economic interests, and cultural contexts.

Hyperreality 2025 proposes that, especially in a world where perception is commodified and capitalized on, we need spaces where collective experience remains possible. Music is such a space. It is not only an expression, but a form of resistance – against standardized realities, commercialized narratives, and cultural homogenization. Music carries stories across cultures and through time, slipping through the cracks of systems, both social and technological, that aim to streamline or erase our celebrated differences. Music remembers, reimagines, and transmits where words fall short – bridging distances not only between people, but across generations.

The 2025 lineup embodies this ethos with a program that spans continents and disciplines, amplifying queer, feminist, and decolonial voices in experimental and electronic music. DJ Cashu co-founded the collective Mamba Negra with Carneosso in 2013: an initiative that creates platforms for diverse artists through independently organized events in abandoned and occupied spaces. Born from São Paulo’s underground, this movement embodies rave culture as resistance, dissolving the boundaries between music, performance, and protest. At Hyperreality 2025, Cashu will not only DJ but also curate a Mamba Negra showcase featuring the five-member band Teto Preto, Cuban-Spanish DJ and Honey Club co-founder TOCCORORO, and local DJs Thao and olgicia.

Lyra Pramuk’s new album Hymnal will be released on June 13 on her own label pop.soil. It explores the voice as a vessel for grief, healing, and collective ritual. Building on the posthuman vocal language of her album Fountain, her live performance merges classical vocal elements with electronic experimentation and folkloric spirituality – a reimagining of the voice in contemporary sound art that feels both archaic and futuristic.

On the same stage, Whatever the Weather – an alias of Loraine James – offers a more introspective, impressionistic perspective than her more IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy work released under her own name on the renowned label Hyperdub. Her latest album leans even further into texture, harmony, and melody.

Moin recontextualizes guitar-based genres by blending elements of post-punk, noise rock, and experimental club music. The London trio – Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews (of Raime) and visionary percussionist Valentina Magaletti – create music that feels both familiar and deeply deconstructed. At Hyperreality, Magaletti will perform with Moin and in a solo set that engages with texture and identity, drawing from projects like Batterie Fragile and A Queer Anthology of Drums.

Tehran-born, Vienna-based sound artist Rojin Sharafi weaves raw emotion with analog, acoustic, and digital elements. Her acclaimed works—including Urns Waiting to be Fed and the debut release of HUUUM – blend Iranian influences with metallic percussion and experimental textures. She will present a new show at Hyperreality 2025.

Clubs are spaces full of contradiction – they can be sites of liberation and of exclusion. Ashland Mines, known as Bobby Beethoven (aka Total Freedom), has been exploring this tension for over a decade. By disrupting the traditional structure of DJ sets, he redefines the danceable. His ability to compress club energy and use CDJs as instruments has earned him iconic status beyond the underground. At Hyperreality, Bobby Beethoven will perform b2b with Salt Server.

Mines' disruptive approach is part of a broader network of artists reshaping electronic music. Cities Aviv fuses hip-hop, experimental sound, and activism into self-released music that resists commercialization and instead acts as sonic resistance and reinvention. Lucia Kagramanyan is rooted in electronic experimentation and political critique. Upsammy navigates the intersections of IDM, ambient, and techno, crafting soundscapes that challenge linearity and expectation. 

While many of the artists at Hyperreality draw on influences beyond today's dance music landscape, they stand on the shoulders of pioneers like Tama Sumo and Lakuti, who have shaped the scene for decades. Known for their influential work with Ostgut Ton and the long-running Your Love series at Panorama Bar, they will play a b2b set at Hyperreality. Similarly, DJ Terror b2b Katia Curie advocate for inclusion on and beyond the dancefloor. Jung an Tagen, aka Stefan Juster, has been exploring the edges of techno for two decades, with releases on labels like Editions Mego (celebrating its 30th anniversary this year) and Diagonal. Since 2020, he has been running the Viennese netlabel ETAT.xyz. At Hyperreality 2025, he will present his new album – or concept – The Revenge of the Speaker People.

Paris-based Emma DJ will debut his first live show at Rewire Festival in The Hague, with Hyperreality as one of his next stops. Known for his raw, hard-to-define productions, his new material moves toward hyperpop elements – setting the stage for DJ g2g, whose sets fuse Latin American club rhythms – Perreo, Cumbia, and Guaracha – with four-to-the-floor beats. DJ DIAMOND, part of the Fast & Nice collective, spans hard trance to nightcore to gabber.

Beyond the classic club and concert context, Hyperreality creates immersive spaces for international and local artists who view music as a transgressive art form – where sound, performance, and architecture are equally weighted. In 2025, this approach also takes shape in an art project: Lesbian Bar. What began as an artistic initiative has evolved into a space with real political relevance. Lesbian Bar interrogates existing hierarchies in club culture and their relationship to safe spaces – creating a site for the lesbian gaze.

This space is for all D¥kes (transfeminine, transmasculine, non-binary, intersex, and cis D¥kes as well as bi- and ace D¥kes) and FLINTA individuals. It is open to all who can benefit from it – including friends and allies – provided a respectful atmosphere is maintained.*

Evelyn Plaschg, who also has a background in visual art, creates immersive sound performances that blend tenor recorder, voice, and electronic synths with field recordings. She will open the festival on May 23.

Lineup: