Thomas Huber.

How did your connection to Vienna’s psytrance scene begin? Do you remember the first night you helped organise, and what you wanted to make different or special?

I first encountered psytrance around 2006/2007. Friends introduced me to tracks by Infected Mushroom, Skazi and then Neelix. A year or two later, we started going to our first psytrance parties: Cosmic Space Disco, for example, which I initially attended as a guest and later took over, or Paradise Winter Festival, which I have also been continuing for a few years now.

At some point in the early 2010s, friends and I began putting on our own, not entirely legal psytrance parties in the nearby woods. The response was huge at the time, and that gave me the idea of perhaps making it my profession, or at least doing it on a larger scale and more often.

I then began organising my first indoor parties at Hyrtl Haus in Perchtoldsdorf. Thanks to a few connections, I was able to move to Grelle Forelle fairly quickly, where we held our first psytrance event in 2014.

Almost from the beginning, my inspiration was to offer people something they couldn’t experience anywhere else in Vienna. I always wanted to book the best acts, clubs and decoration teams to create something that would make people go home afterwards thinking: Wow, what was that?

At Psytrance Universe at Werk in September, psytrance was joined by a second floor with harder sounds. What appealed to you about that combination, and what did the night teach you about how guests move between floors?

Since I also used to organise tekno and harder-sounds events, it’s tempting to bring that kind of sound into our psytrance events more often. In principle, I really like the idea of bringing several different sounds together in one night so we can simply offer the audience more.

How has the way people work together in the scene changed over the years? And what do you want to preserve or try out at your upcoming events?

Preserving open communication in the psytrance scene is very important to me. That’s what I learned from my ‘mentors’, and I try to carry it into the future. Whether it’s coordinating dates, discussing bookings or decoration teams and so on, we always try to find solutions in advance and build a lasting spirit of cooperation. Working against each other only creates losers.

2027 is going to be a really exciting year for us! As always, it begins in January with Paradise Winter Festival. After that, though, there’s almost no break until well into the summer. The ideas simply never stop. :)