Vienna Waves East And West

The inaugural Waves Vienna conference and showcase in Austria pulled 225 paying delegates but event organiser Thomas Heher is happy with its debut and is already making plans for next year.

The fact the delegates came from a spread of 21 countries gives it some claim to having international appeal, but it also made its mark with the quality of its panels.

Eurosonic-Noorderslag creative director Peter Smidt, who made one of the Waves Vienna keynote addresses, was so taken by the session on old Eastern Bloc markets that he wants an updated re-run at his own event in The Netherlands in January.

Smidt will doubtless want to beef up his conference’s coverage of these so-called emerging markets since getting European Union money to develop the European Talent Exchange Programme in that region.

At the beginning of March, the EU gave Eurosonic euro 2.1 million to fund a five-year plan to grow the scheme in territories that were once behind the Iron Curtain.

At Serbia’s Exit Festival July 9, he announced that eight new festivals from central and eastern Europe will join a wider ETEP initiative that will now be known as ETEP 2.

The longer-term plan is to grow the number of festivals participating in ETEP 2 from 60 in 2011 to 100 in 2015.

The other key ETEP 2 figures to show in Vienna, which was almost literally split by the Iron Curtain after WWII, included Ivan Milivojev from Serbia’s Exit Festival and Fruzsina Szép from Sziget Festival in Hungary.

Heher admits much of the support for Waves Vienna came from the surrounding countries’ music export offices and neighbours with similar conferences, such as Tallinn Music Week organiser Helen Sildna.

The acts at Waves Vienna, which ran Sept. 28 to Oct. 2, were sourced by Hannes Tschürtz from Ink Music, an Austrian agency that’s just opened a second office in Berlin.

The 80-act lineup included British Sea Power, Dry The River, The Duke Spirit, Ewert And The Two Dragons, Gang Of Four, Rubik, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, and Who Made Who.

The shows were hosted by some of the city’s better-known clubs including Flex, Badeschiff, Fluc, and Pratersauna.