 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
After a long time of considering we finally decided not to continue organizing the festival, at least until further notice. Probably, nobody will find that as hard as we do ourselves that it ends now after four years. Thinking back to the beginning of the festival, it is, however, wonderful to see how long it went well. After all, at first we wanted to do the festival only one single time.
Over the course of the last four years a lot has changed - babies, working abroad, studying, ...
In the end one has to wholly pour one's heart into it when organizing the Wackelsteinfestival, whereas our hearts strive too much for other things right now.
Many thanks to all of you - until we see again; hopefully not before too long!
After letting much too much time pass finally another update. Today I finally brought the start page up to date, and apart from that also the page with the music links. Thanks to Emil Lubej there are again recordings available at Emap.fm of all bands performing at the festival. Enjoy!
Apart from that photos taken at the festival have been available for a while now. Warm thanks for that go to Max Ringler, Lukas Traxler and Andi Seyfang.
By now we have crunched through all the numbers related to the last festival, and, unfortunately, the results were a bit bleak. The funding we got does not even cover half of the expenses we have for the bands alone. A rainy year like this one does not exactly help. Now we are considering whether there will be a fifth Wackelsteinfestival. Up to now, nothing has been decided, and we will keep you posted with news on this topic.
The fourth Wackelsteinfestival is over. Thanks to all who came and stayed despite the less than cheerful weather on Saturday. Thanks to all our volunteers - you were as unbelievably great as always.
Unfortunately, we got surprised by an unexpected rush on our vegetarian kitchen - next year we will work out a better solution for that, in order for working there to be fun again.
Cleaning up the festival grounds makes good progress - I already had to take my leave yesterday because I'll have to hop back to Canada tomorrow. As soon as I'll have time I'll update the homepage, upload photos and keep you posted on what's going on.
Again thanks to everyone - to guests and volunteers alike.
We're online again. It seems that the Telecom turned off our server line in a burst of some pervert last-minute humor. We are terribly sorry if the down time led to some inconvinience on your side - you are very welcome to send complaints to the Austrian Telecom.
Here on the festival grounds the sun is shining, the beer is cooled, hooked up and tastes nearly too good to keep on working - to keep it short: the festival can begin!
We're sitting in the sun, here in Amaliendorf and are nearly finished setting up the infrastructure - even the stage is very close to being done. A few last preparations are still to do, and then we will only have to wait a bit until you join us up here.
The weather forecast looks quite okay - from experience we can say that the weather here in Amaliendorf will be even better than the forecast because the clouds usually split at several hills around here and pass us by.
To summarize, everything is going well here, and we are looking forward to see you here at the Wackelstein.
This year we have several Workshops - more than we had the last years. We have adapted the page accordingly - hopefully making it more easily accessible.
In addition there are some changes regarding the parking at the festival. The meadow at the edge of the forest is now solely reserved for camping. This and more important information about getting to the festival and staying there you can find here.
Since the end of this week - finally, tickets for the Festival are available. You will find more information here.
I made somewhat of a Wackelstein marathon today and finally brought the homepage up to date - don't lynch me if you find that I have forgotten some detail.
Apart from the new design there's actually some really interesting news: we got our funding after all! For us that means we don't have to tremble out of nervousness about making it through this year. For you it means: there will we two more bands!
Of course we had to adjust our band line-up a bit to accommodate the changes - we hope you will enjoy it.
Additionally - since today the information about the workshops (of which we have quite a few this year) is online.
A bit late but nevertheless you will finally find the complete program for this year's festival on the homepage. Today we have added a last band on Friday: Cairdeas. If we should get the financial support we need from the government, we might manage to expand the program a bit. We already have plans in mind but, unfortunately, we will only get to know whether we get the support or not more or less on the evening before the festival. You notice that the tire world-wide financial situation has even reached us. In spite of it we have worked hard to present you with a program of the finest music and great atmosphere. We hope you will find joy in it.
Today's two new bands are Pan and Freischwimma. There was a small mistake in Sunday's band line-up. I corrected it today: Freischwimma will be the last band on Sunday - Blackbush is going to play a bit earlier.
Today we have once again two more bands for you, Ranarim from Sweden and Blackbush from Austria. At our music page you will as always find links, in order to listen into and get an idea about the music of this year's festival.
A bit later than intended today you'll finally find the next two bands online - The Irish Rovers of Budapest and Danar.
The first bands went online! Have fun with the band infos and with the links to listen to them.
Interesting... some of the entries here seem to have been lost. No idea how that happened. Anyhow, we have by far not been as inactive as the date of the last existing entry might suggest.
Maybe you've already noticed that we began to bring the homepage up to date for the next festival. Behind the scenes we are busily planning and organizing. The application for funding has been sent, the band line up is nearly finished. Soon we will present you the program for 2009, links to the bands and music samples to listen to.
If you want to help us as a volunteer this year, we would be very glad if you contacted us.
If you've already seen all the photos we have here, you can find a massive amount of additional photos of all three days of the Wackelsteinfestival 2008 here on the webpage of Andreas Biedermann.
Slowly we are going to start planning the program for the Wackelsteinfestival 2009. That means we are looking forward to get demos and information from interested bands - please mail them to our address.
Something different: can somebody among you remember what we called the fiery brasilian breads we sold? I'm curious because hopefully we'll have them again next year. To ease your mind: this is not a case of premature loss of memory - the name was invented by some of our volunteers without any interaction from our side.
We're sorry that our homepage was down yesterday - unfortunately, it took a while after a power failure to get the server up and running again.
I just finished sorting all the photos of the festival we got . I'm sorry that it took me so long. Anyway: we hope you'll have a lot of joy leafing through them.
If you should miss something you might have forgotten at the festival, we have found several things during the clean-up - here's a list - let us know and we'll see how to best get your things back to you.
Just as we thought: the weather will be fine - it's nearly tradition by now that the weather forecast improves dramatically during the last few days before the festival. During the nights it can become relatively cool (in the temperature sense) but that's typical for the Woodquarter - it would be good idea to bring some warmer clothes for the evenings.
By the way: under Tickets & Info -> Mitfahren there's the possibility to either offer or look for ride sharing - would be nice if some car pools would result from that - I've happily noticed that some among you did already use that page.
The day after tomorrow the waiting will have an end - the preparations are moving ahead smoothly, everything already looks nearly as it should look like, and our happy anticipation grows in the most positive sense above our heads - as it should be.
For a few days now we have been busy setting everything up on the festival grounds, once again with the praiseworthy help of many volunteers, and in a few days the Wackelsteinfestival will finally take place for the third time.
We hope that you will love it as much as you did in the last years, and that you won't let yourself down because of some weather forecasts - they've always been wrong during the last years with respect to the actual weather at the festival itself. The usual scenario is that it rains and storms everywhere, while at the festival we have a brilliantly blue sky and we meet the sun's wondrous glare with cooling beer.
Something important: during the time of the festival, the Austrian railway (Öbb) runs a railway-subsitution bus line over a part of the line between Vienna and Gmünd. Unfortunately, that will lead to a 20 minute delay of the arrivals at Gmünd and departing trains will leave Gmünd 20 minutes earlier than scheduled. We will adjust our shuttle times accordingly so that, unfortunately, the times given on our folders will not be correct anymore. If, against all likelyhood, you should encounter any problems, let us know and we will find a solution.
It's time for a short update from our side: we are busy planning, in the meantime we found enough wonderful people who volunteer to help us at the festival, and next week we will start to set up the festival.
Pleasant news: this year we will, for the first time, offer Wackelstein t-shirts - they will come in various sizes and cut half, half for men and women. To be on the safe side for the moment we ordered only one hundred of them but soon you will have the opportunity to order t-shirts online or to write us and wait a bit for another collective order. Thanks to all of you who asked us when we will finally make t-shirts for the festival, and also to all of you who participated in our online poll last year, asking whether we should print and sell t-shirts.
Starting today tickets for the festival are available! You get them online at öTicket, or via 01/96096 (from other countries: +43 1 96096) at the öTicket-Hotline, as well as in all branches of the Erste Banken and Sparkasse throughout Austria. You can have a look at the prices on our ticket page. For all who've already been at the festival in the past: of course the prices did not change.
Apart from that there's some more personal news: in three weeks after the day after tomorrow I'll skip back into Austria in time for the last preparations for the festival - for three and a half wackelstein-full weeks. I'm looking forward to the festival, to see all of you again, to be back in the Woodquarter, and, last but not least, I'm looking forward to a G'spritzter and Austrian beer.
It took a while but finally the information on this year's workshops is online. We hope that you will again enjoy them as much as the last two years. Apart from that there's a new page now called "General Info", which - you guessed correctly - contains some general information about the festival - especially for those among you who will come by for the first time: have a look at it because some of the things there are not mentioned anywhere else on our homepage.
If there's still somebody among you who would like to volunteer to help at the festival: by and by we're running out of free places so it would be a good idea to contact us soon.
We are sorry that our homepage was down for a while - we had to do some important maintenance work on the server and hope you forgive us any inconvenience.
Observative visitors might have noticed that our homepage got a new makeup - I always try to stick close to Michi's genius's poster and folder designs, but there's good reasons why he is our designer and not me ;-)
The structure of the menu is not ideal yet - it will have to suffer through some further fiddling in the near future. I hope you won't be too confused by it in the meanwhile.
As promised we put the missing parts of the program online this week. I have to admit I did not manage to get the announcement of the Open Stage done, which of course will again take place this year - I will make up for it as soon as possible. Apart from that we will soon announce details on this year's workshop. Until then have a look at the finished band line-up. Today we added three more bands: Fei Scho, Catriona McKay & Chris Stout and the Bluespumpm.
Once more we have two new bands for you this week: Nim Sofyan and Aufstrich. Within the upcoming week we will publish the rest of the band line-up here so that you will finally have an impression of the whole. Until then we hope you'll have fun browsing trough the program so far!
This week we have two new bands for you: Ballycotton (A) and the Curbside Prophets (A). We will start now to increase our pace a bit in order for you to have the full program in hands soon.
Everything's working again - once again sorry for "not being availabe" for a while.
We are sorry that our pages were not available for a while because of our change to a new provider. E-Mailing us should hopefully work again tomorrow. For the technically interested: it took a while to set the DNS-entries - on the MX-entries we still have to wait.
Apart from that the new server should be a lot faster, thus hopefully letting you wait a bit less when you're surfing our pages.
Today we have one more band for you: Landor, who will open the evening's main program on Friday. Apart from that we had to move back the start times of two of the bands because we wanted to have a bit more time for the technical pause between groups. This way all of us will have slightly more time to catch our breath, to grab a beer and to gather new strength for dancing, and last but not least this way we will have music longer into the night.
Today we have once more another band for you - this time it's something Scandinavian: Phønix. Have a look and listen into it - because from today there's finally links to some audio samples. Have fun! Apart from that I substituted our Map to find the festival with a Google-map - this way you'll be able to plan your personal route. That's it for today...
Today we finally managed to update the page about us. I had not realized how bad it was, but the content was, let us say slightly outdated, so as not have to say "completely past and gone". Now, it's okay again, and if you're interested you can have a look at it. The most important change is that our team has again grown this year - Klara is still a benevolent spirit, but not anymore the one acting in the background.
After we began to post the program on the homepage last week, there's of course again another band today - you can find out more here. Shortly we will also put online some links where you can already listen a bit into the music of the bands.
At this point we want to thank all the lovely people who could make it to our volunteer's party and who will again give their best to help us this year. Thanks of course also go to all those who unfortunately could not come to the party but let us know that they will help anyway.
For those among you who want to help us: there's still enough to do and we're happy about everybody who wants to help us to realize this festival.
The program for 2008 is finished! Shortly we will begin to publish the bands and their line-up here. As in the last years we hope, of course, that you'll like it. The bands will come from near and far, from all directions you can wheel and turn to. Okay, admittedly we will again show a slight scottish affinity this year, but not quite as much as you might believe.
Slowly we're getting into the more concrete regions of planning the festival. Like every year we will of course need the help of all those volunteering lovely people out there. No matter whether you've already helped us in the past or not, if you want to help, just send us an email or, even better, come to our
Volunteer's Party/Meeting on March the 27th 2008, from 7pm
At the Heureka, Skodagasse 17, Vienna, 8th district
Clearly, we're going to take care of food and drinks. It was about time anyway, that we meet each other again. Unfortunately, we guys/gals from the Wackelsteinfestival had a lot going on privately so that we only now could find time for this meeting. To all amoung you, who've already helped us in the past, I will send an email just to make sure you know. If you did help in the past but you don't get that email, chances are that I don't have your email address.
We are sorry that our guestbook did not work temporarily. Now, everything should be fine again.
I just noticed that we forgot and can only far too late but with appropriately greater joy say:
We Wackelstein guys and gals hope you all will have a wonderful, musically thriving, joy sparkling, nimble-footed through sunlight dancing, in other words, a comparatively nice, new year!
Important mainly for bands who want to send us demo material:
our mailing address has changed
The new address you can find on our contact page. If you should recently have mailed something, it will of course not get lost in the abyss.
Another short comment: although my (Rainer's) old telephone number (0650/8249505) still exists it belongs to somebody else now. If you want to phone one of us, best give a ring to Madeleine (0699/10756390) or to my now number (0720/731879). Because I live a bit time-shifted right now you can usually reach me between 3pm and 6am
So... after an extraordinarily long "summer break" we are freshly and alive back on stage to roar out into the world: the third Wackelsteinfestival is approaching!
Though the program is not fixed yet we are working assiduously to make it so as soon as possible. Shortly afterwards you will be able to read it here.
At this spot I should also mention that, as every year, we are looking forward to any help for the festival. Simply contact us if you're up to actively help at the festival. To all of you who have already been with us over the last years we will write a tentative e-mail shortly. Of course, at the right time, there will again be small party for our helpers in order for the bonds between us not to fade.
So: come back here from time to time - from now on I will attempt to keep the "news" really up to date.
Finally I shove the photos onto the homepage and I'm listening to the recordings at Emap; Harlequin's Glance and Lori Watson, yeah! - I hope you're similarly well. Have fun in paging through the photos.
Please forgive me that there are still no photos. If everything is going well, I will get the first load of photos tomorrow night. I'll try hard to get them online as soon as possible. Of course we are delighted about any photos you would like to send us, and we would publish them here as well. Until the mid of August you can send photos to my address (Rainer Kaltenbaek, Favoritenstraße 74/8, 1040 Wien), afterwards you should send them to Pauli (Paul Dangl, Columbusgasse 38/10, 1100 Wien), who will send them one way or the other to me when I'm in Canada (naturally, I will be back for the next festival). Maybe I'll come up with some clever way for you to directly upload you photos to our page - let's see.
As soon as I'll have got the photos on the home page, I will also update the rest a bit.
Now we are back after a short delay. Monday and Tuesday we (at least most of us) were still engaged with cleaning the festival grounds and some other small stuff (with kind regards to all our guests because the amount of garbage was within easily manageable limits).
It was a wonderful festival, which also we organizers had a lot of fun in! We are delighted that all of you came and even more so that you enjoyed it. Over the next days I will update the homepage (I hope to get the photos soon). In the meanwhile you can already listen to recordings of the bands at the festival at Emap.fm.
One more note to the prices of the nonalcoholic drinks: there we made a mistake, which we did not notice. We are happy that you made us aware of it. Next year we will straighten out this error such that you won't have to resort to water out of annoyance. Among the mass of details, which we had to take care of, we seem to have missed this (admittedly important) one, but we learn from our mistakes.
Keep your eyes open for news, which we will present here. Otherwise we wish you a sunny, a, depending on your disposition, calm or wild, and continuously beautiful summer.
I only say: the beer arrived just now.
We'll see each other at the festival!
A short note, if somebody among you actually believes in the nonsensical weather forecasts. First of all: we are convinced that the weather will be somewhere between OK and terrific - at the location of our festival, events have been taking place for more than sixty years around the same time as our festival - only two of these events were "spoiled" by rain. For example, last year we had a perfectly sunny sky at our festival while it was raining and storming everywhere else in the Wood-Quarter. Also, we will of course not be put down by a little bit of rain - heavy artillery would be necessary for that. If, against all probability, tropical storms haunted our festival, it would take place nevertheless. In the worst of all cases, if the sound system were endangered, we would transfer the festival into the Volksheim of Amaliendorf (Hauptstraße 255) - but that won't happen. If it did, you could of course sleep either in the Volksheim itself or at some other dry place, which we would provide. The prices would be drastically reduced, and part of the prices of the tickets, which have already been bought, would be refunded. More detailed info will be provided if all gods actually plot against us.
That means: no matter what happens: we willrock until the stones start singing.
In any case you should keep in mind that you will be traveling into the Wood-Quarter, where it can get pretty cool during the night - to bring something warm to wear would, therefore, be a good idea.
Something else: this year we will lay out the camp site a bit larger than last year, which will go on the cost of the parking space next to the festival grounds. We would appreciate it if you were making use of the parking lot opposite the inn "Fego" (Hauptstraße 78). Of course we will set up signs to clearly indicate that parking lot.
The first wooden stands have been set up, the wine has been buyed and tasted. Some things are of course still left to do but the festival is slowly becoming apparant in midst of the trees. We are already camping, have lapsed into the wackelstein fever and are looking forward to the moment, when you will come next week to join us here.
Today we will start with setting up the festival's infrastructure. First, though, we will make a short detour into the Kamp-Valley in order to refill our wine reserves (of course there will again be the wine bar, at which we will sell excellent white wines from the wine-maker Brandl from Straß im Strassertale).
One update of this site here I will hopefully manage on the upcoming weekend, and then... only a few days left - we are already exhilarated with pleasant anticipation!
Since today everything should finally be fine with the ticket ordering at öTicket. That means, you can order tickets online at öTicket, as well as under +43-1-96096 at the öTicket-Hotline. Of course it is also still possible to order tickets in the usual way at all branches of the Erste Bank and Sparkasse throughout Austria.
If you should encounter any problems when ordering the tickets, please contact me (Rainer Kaltenbaek, +43-650-8249505. Then I will be able to take care of these problems.
Unfortunately, there has been a misunderstanding with öTicket with regard to the tickets for our festival. Therefore, it has not been possible to order via öTicket's telephone hotline. This misunderstanding has been smoothed out, and the tickets should be available starting from the day after tomorrow (July 7th) both at öTicket's online-shop as well as under their telephone hotline 01/96096. We are terribly sorry and hope you will forgive us this unpleasantness. We will keep you posted over the next days on any news regarding this business.
The date for the guitar workshop has now been fixed to Saturday from 10h to about 13h.
The festival itself is coming closer with huge steps - today we will send out the working schedule for our volunteers and yesterday we came to the point where we talked about, for example, how many salad bowls we are going to need... to put it short: the planning has reached the final stage, next week we will unhurriedly begin with the setup at the festival location, and shortly afterwards, the waiting will finally find its end.
right away: it is fix now that the Fingerstyle guitar workshop will take place because enough people have shown interest in it. Nevertheless there are still places available - please, simply contact Markus to register. When the Workshop will take place, we are going to announce here in a short while.
At the moment we are working on the duty schedule for the voluntary workers at the festival. Right now there are still several free positions, that means if you are motivated to help at the festival, now is the right moment to tell us about it. The conditions are the same as last year: for each shift you work (4 hours), you get free entry for one day, 3 vouchers for drinks and one voucher for food. Apart from these vouchers: of course no voluntary helper will go hungry or thirsty at our festival.
Finally, after one week of tinkering with the home page, our completely reprogrammed site went online today. The content is (in huge parts) more or less equivalent to the original home page, but if you are reading this, you will have noticed one of the major changes: we translated nearly everything into English. We hope, that will be useful for some of our guests. The translations are not always fully equivalent to their German counter parts because writing the same thing twice offers very limited amusement to me. Those of you, who can read both languages might try both versions and see, which one you like better.
We want to apologize that some of the pages did not work during the last days - everything should be fine now.
During the work on the home page we updated the links - maybe something of interest to you is among them. Unfortunately, there is no English translation of the link descriptions - that did not work with the plugin we are using. Additional (smaller) updates will follow over the next days and weeks.
On the page Share a Ride you have the opportunity to communicate with other future festival guests in order to find or offer a shared ride to the festival.