Unsafe+Sounds 2026: Second artist announcement
The festival has revealed 16 new artists joining this year’s line-up. We offer a glimpse into a multifaceted programme that challenges as much as it invites deeper engagement. Get a sense of the featured acts by listening to the festival mix that is painting the air with sounds to get you in the mood. Tune into the emotional frequency ~
The website goes live in one week.
Tickets across all categories are available now.
Starting from a spiritual invocation …
‘O, Dark Mother’
We seem to be increasingly disenchanted by our surroundings, which makes it all the more urgent to resist it — to start re-enchanting the world. MASMA DREAM WORLD is the multidisciplinary New York-based artist Devi Mambouka. Mambouka invites us to take part in a ritual that is as once forceful as it’s magical, shaped by her African and Asian heritage. Mambouka is more than a musician: a self-described medium, she summons and channels spirits while worshipping the Goddess Kali. Mambouka spent much of her childhood in the Central African country of Gabon. Indigenous ceremonies in which ancestors and deities are invoked through drumming, singing, dance, and trance have profoundly influenced her performances, while her sound moves between doom metal and archaic drones. FFO: Sunn O))), Phurpa, or Pan Daijing.
Hybrid Pop-Sketches, Autotuned Diaries
“The only thing in life is worth doing again is trying”
Fragments of the present: it’s brittle, reduced song sketches that Alina Astrova presents across her various projects. The Estonian-born musician and producer, who has been based in London for many years, is known as LOLINA, formerly as Inga Copeland, and as one half of infamous Hype Williams alongside Dean Blunt. With her concept albums and deliberately cultivated amateurism, she has become something of a poster child for a new lo-fi pop aesthetic. Her tracks are fleeting snapshots of an artist who continually reinvents herself and resists any stable identity. Cut-ups, sparse beats, dissolving synths, and what The Wire described as a “bored cool-girl rap” coalesce into idiosyncratic mutant pop.
“There’s no cynicism here – the songs work because they come from a genuine place.” (Boomkat)
Also based in London is British-Chinese artist Tim Zha, aka ORGAN TAPES. Shaped by a private narrative, his songs resemble blueprints of emotional states, bringing the artist and his emotions to the foreground. An influential artist’s artist, Zha has produced for Triad God, among others, and played a significant role in shaping the aesthetics of the post-internet underground. His eclectic, diary-like numbers combine bedroom pop, Chinese city folk, 1980s indie, slacker rock, and cloud rap. Running through them is Zha’s Auto-Tuned voice, which, rather than creating distance, produces a peculiar sense of intimacy.
From psychoacoustic minimalism to dissociative configurations
Born in Hong Kong and now based in the United States, AMMA ATERIA meticulously explores the effects of sound on perception and consciousness. Working with subtle frequency shifts, beating patterns, and spatial movements of sound, she operates within the field of psychoacoustics, deliberately unsettling our senses. With the immediacy of tension and release, Amma Ateria navigates between oppositions, transforming deafening noise into meditative stance. Her work combines artistic research with a profound sensitivity to space, resonance, and deep listening, using brainwave synchronisation as compositional material.
Austrian artist, composer, filmmaker, and producer PETER KUTIN likewise works at the intersection of experimental composition and perceptual research. Circulating movements of sound, pulses of light, physically confrontational yet immersive and compelling: his compositions unfold through tightly interwoven arrangements of light and sound. His colleague, Tehran-born singer and musician OMID DARVISH, known from formations such as Huuum and Kurdophone, channels profound emotions through his voice. The two musicians come together with violinist ANNA LINDENBAUM, a founding member of Ensemble NAMES and known for her adventurous approaches to sound to create an impactful multimedia piece.
Synthetic field recordings, sonic fictions, sound worlds teeming with life: Vienna-based composer, artist, sound researcher, and architect ROBERT SCHWARZ brings together influences from computer music, sound studies, and architecture to unsettle our senses while evoking vivid images. For more than twenty years, Schwarz has investigated acoustic phenomena, directing his attention towards the hidden and uncovering details that usually escape our perception. From the interplay of field recordings and sound synthesis, he creates abstract sonic structures that open up profound, dislocated listening experiences while critically questioning established habits of hearing. In his current work, which he will present live for the first time, he investigates the remarkable bioacoustic characteristics and spatio-temporal organisation of cicada sound production. Open air.
Lyrical, delicate folk-pop
“An enchanted, waking dream blend “
Lithuanian multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, and producer GINTĖ PREISAITĖ creates sensitive, folk-inflected, light-footed pieces that activate a sphere of collective memory. Her musical language is fragmentary and lyrical, plays with intimacy, and draws its character from the heterogeneous timbres of the instruments and sound sources she employs. A classically trained pianist, Preisaitė frequently works with extended playing techniques. Above all, however, it is her voice that breathes life into the compositions. Educated at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory, where artists such as ML Buch and Erika de Casier also began their careers, Preisaitė situates her work between pop sensibility, modern classical, and avant-garde experimentation.
The music of Vienna- and London-based duo BARA&ISA is marked by an exceptional tenderness. Resembling a contemporary form of devotional music, electric organ, harp, bells, flutes, field recordings, and voice notes come together in gentle songs. The result is a fragile music of quiet intensity — compositions that do not impose themselves, but instead carefully open up a space for attention.
Synth-Animism and Trombone-Minimalism
ISABELLA FORCINITI’s modular synth performances resemble an animistic séance. The Italian-born, Vienna-based composer, musician, has a degree in communication sciences. Forciniti brings the instrument to life with an incredible agility and sensitivity: it begins to speak, to communicate with her. Forciniti continuously listens in, adjusts, tries to understand, and channels its message. Witnessing this interaction between musician and machine feels nothing short of magical.
Her colleague CHLOÉ RYO, a French-born trombonist and sound artist who is based in Vienna, electronically amplifies her instrument and draws unfamiliar and uncanny sounds from it. Inspired by her contemporary surroundings, she’s transcending traditional categories, moving freely between experimental and contemporary classical music, minimalism and jazz.
Trance, Ambient-Trance
Coming from the realm of club music, ALPHA TRACKS certainly has experience with collective states of trance. Vienna-based DJ and producer Felix Benedikt is best known to many as a techno DJ, yet his atmospheric synth-sets reveal the natural affinity between the two loop-based genres Techno and Ambient. Somewhere between sunset-Ibiza atmo-tracks and more austere forms of abstract music, Alpha Tracks creates environments that invite listeners to zone out. The DJ set will take place open air in the garden of Wotruba Church.
Arts & Literature
There will also be readings at this year’s festival. Kraków-based writer NATALIA PANZER will be coming to Vienna. In her spoken-word performances, often tinged with a surreal quality, Panzer recounts impressions, perceptions and observations of her surroundings in a soft, hushed voice reminiscent of Robert Ashley’s voices. The NTS Radio host and former collaborator of Voice Actor, with whom she formed the duo ana reme, works across writing and music. At the festival, she will present a reading at the Wotruba Church.
ZARA JOAN MILLER is an artist working across poetry, performance and film. Often inspired by modes of global time-keeping such as calendar dates and lunar cycles, her writing situates itself in communal time and space before taking root in the private body. Guided by aesthetics of mould and glitch, her multi-disciplinary performances draw from ongoing research into abjection, lactation and ancestry. Her work often experiments with movement and sound as a way of reimagining the rhythm of human and non-human bodies, forcing them to merge and meet.
Vienna-based South Korean artist SO YOUNG PARK works at the intersection of live performance and performative installation. Her practice explores the liminal state between living and dying, as well as the transience embedded in everyday life. Starting from the question of how we should live as we move towards death, Park traces memories and sensations inscribed in the body. By transferring these onto dried flowers, which themselves retain the fragility of their life cycle, she searches for alternative states of being alive and reflects on the fragile presence of the body.
