music unlimited 40.
With wide-open ears.
Wolfgang Wasserbauer on friendships, computers as instruments and the particular spirit of music unlimited.
Wolfgang Wasserbauer · waschaecht
An invitation can begin a friendship that lasts decades. A room can change a concert. And a curious audience keeps listening beyond familiar categories. For the 40th edition of music unlimited in Wels, we talk to Wolfgang Wasserbauer from waschaecht about these encounters, working with curator Mariá Portugal, and what keeps a festival alive after so many editions. This year’s edition, “The Navel of the Dream”, takes place from 5 to 8 November 2026.
music unlimited brings experimental music, free improvisation, jazz and electronic approaches together in Wels. Mariá Portugal curates its 40th edition in 2026. She is pictured playing drums in the cover photograph; our interviewee is Wolfgang Wasserbauer.
When invitations become friendships
Looking back at previous editions, which encounter between musicians has stayed with you because it led to something you hadn’t expected yourselves? Tell us how it came about.
It really does happen that encounters with musicians turn into friendships. When we invited the British guitarist and composer Fred Frith in 1991 to present several of his projects, we had no idea that close ties would develop, extending to visits to one another.
That has happened a few times over all these years, most memorably with the people in the Dutch band The Ex, who unfortunately are often described, rather reductively, as a punk band. Numerous performances in all kinds of formations followed. Some of them are among the most formative memories in unlimited’s history.
A programme with Mariá Portugal
Mariá Portugal is curating this year’s programme. How do you work with her? Was there a proposal that first made you stop and consider how you could make it happen in Wels?
Working with Mariá Portugal came about quite organically, partly because earlier encounters had convinced us of her artistic gifts and personal strengths.
One main challenge followed naturally from her Latin American background: she wanted to bring many projects from South America to Wels, but our financial realities only allowed that to a limited extent.
Attempts to book very well-known American-Brazilian artists such as Arto Lindsay or Juana Molina fell through only narrowly, and ultimately not really because of financial barriers. With the first Austrian performance by Marcelo Galter’s quartet, we have certainly reached the limits of our financial possibilities.
The festival’s very particular spirit must not be lost in the process. That is crucial.
What a room does to music
The Schlachthof, the Landesmusikschule and Schloss Puchberg offer very different spaces. Do you remember a concert that had a completely different effect in one of these places from what you had expected?
First, it is worth mentioning that we have been guests at around ten different locations in the city, each with its own particular characteristics, from a very small, exquisite Baroque pavilion to the large municipal theatre.
The special atmosphere of Schloss Puchberg leads to exceptional performances for musicians and audiences alike; I think we can certainly say that. I remember very fondly a performance by the New Zealand pianist Hermione Johnson, a master of prepared piano. And, “of course”, last year’s very special performance by the French saxophonist Sakina Abdou.
The Landesmusikschule in Wels, meanwhile, has a very special instrument in its Fazioli grand piano. The New York pianist John Blum, for example, played an extraordinarily intense concert on it.
And in 2024, Han Bennink and Mette Rasmussen brought together two generations of outstanding musicians, with at least another generation between them, for a performance that was as moving as it was fascinating.
An audience that keeps listening
Free improvisation, electronic music and very different bands appear side by side in the programme. How do you experience the audience’s response? When do people engage with something they hadn’t originally come for? Do you have a particular memory of that?
The unlimited festival is known for bringing visitors face to face with artists from very different genres. There is plenty of room between new contemporary music and new electronic music, between country and hip-hop, and we really have experienced and made all of that possible here.
But we are also known as a festival attended by curious people who are not only open-hearted but have truly wide-open ears, able to take in many different sounds. The visual artist Siegfried A. Fruhauf once wrote, “At this festival, you look beyond the horizon of the familiar because you want what is possible beyond it.” A very beautiful quote, I think.
But to return to the example above: many visitors were certainly surprised when they suddenly found themselves watching a band performing country-style Willie Nelson songs. That worked too.
We have always wanted to work as close as possible to the pulse of the times, so electronic music naturally found its way into our programmes too. I still remember very well what the first attempts looked like, when computers appeared on stage for the first time and musicians operated fairly enormous “machines”, producing rather unusual sounds. That caused a certain amount of irritation among the audience, even hostility. Apparently, the sounds weren’t supposed to be “too new” after all.
Vienna already had some truly creative minds around the Mego and Charhizma labels, who brought great music and festivals into being.
Later, a certain scepticism emerged, justified in my view, when laptops became established as musical instruments but performance practice didn’t quite keep pace, to put it that way. I saw a laptop ensemble perform where some of the musicians were lying on the floor and occasionally reaching for the keyboard. Or performances where the stage setup looked more like a smart office.
But overall, electronic music reached and certainly enriched the creative worlds of jazz and improvised music too. That was also because there were people who engaged deeply with the possibilities it offered improvising musicians, for example.
This led to attempts to shape the computer not merely as a tool for playing back or producing pre-made music, but as an instrument that could be played directly: open and improvisational.
Professionalism without losing the spirit
A 40th edition brings a great deal of experience together. What do you consciously do differently today, and which small habit do you want to keep, even if it never appears in a festival description?
Although our festival thrives on the sense that many of the people working here are deeply committed volunteers, we now need a higher professional standard, which we can only achieve by hiring paid specialists in certain areas. We can no longer move away from that.
But the festival’s very particular spirit must not be lost in the process. That is crucial.
Something we no longer mention, because it has become second nature to us, is that we aim for parity on as many levels as possible, from the people working on the festival to the artists. In the audience, too, for example, we would love to see many more women, many more younger people, and so on.
In a conversation with Fred Frith, whom I mentioned at the beginning, the great pianist Irène Schweizer once said something along the lines of: how lovely that so many women musicians always perform here. Fred replied: but the best thing is, they don’t even talk about it!
music unlimited 40
Interview by email · Editorial and image art direction: SCENE:ID. Peter Gannushkin · Liz Zaanen · Petra Cvelbar