Henrik Schwarz Samples Schubert at a Beer Brewery
The Pop-Kultur Festival is one of those events that exists in deliberate contrast to everything the word "festival" implies. No mud. No headliner nostalgia. No lineup engineered to satisfy the largest possible demographic. What it did, during its run at the Kulturbrauerei in Prenzlauer Berg—a sprawling former brewery that handles both the industrial and the intimate with equal ease—was book artists who had something actually at stake in what they were presenting.
The 2018 edition was the fourth, and the commissioned works were its axis. Henrik Schwarz collaborated with the Dutch Alma Quartet on a piece called Plunderphonia—Schwarz sampling some of the most charged string quartets from the past few centuries, extracting them into new notation, the electronic and the classical genuinely tangled together rather than politely coexisting. That opened the festival. It set the register for everything that followed.
Kat Frankie’s commissioned work leaned into protest music—loud, not gentle, not asking for permission. The band Hope was working with darkness as a generative condition, a place where things begin rather than end. Haiyti, the Hamburg rapper who blends gangsta posture with cloud rap in ways that shouldn’t hold together but absolutely do, brought a live show that felt genuinely urban in a context that could easily have tipped into art-school preciousness. John Maus—the American who makes music that sounds like goth pop filtered through a philosophy seminar—was on the bill. So was Noga Erez, the Israeli electronic artist who writes about sexual violence and the politics of a generation that refuses to stay quiet. And Pan Daijing, whose experimental practice operates at the outer edge of what listening even is.
Theater RambaZamba, the Berlin theater company whose ensemble includes actors with Down syndrome and other disabilities, appeared for the first time as a Pop-Kultur venue. That detail mattered. It said something about what the curators actually meant when they talked about inclusion.
Co-curator Martin Hossbach talked about wanting to be inclus-, not exclusive,
and festival director Katja Lucker described the goal as celebrating the openly conceived and high quality of contemporary pop culture.
That kind of language is easy to be cynical about. But then you look at the actual lineup and it mostly holds up. Dark folk, glittering pop, Hamburg rap, experimental noise, and a Dutch string quartet getting sampled in real time. The definition of pop being used here was large enough to be genuinely interesting.
Rock am Ring it was not. This was the festival for people who find the standard options insufficient—not because there’s anything wrong with large crowds and familiar songs, but because something else is also needed. Pop-Kultur was reliably the something else.