Edinburgh Tradfest: Alicia Edelweiss

“With smiles on our lips and song in our hearts, we have witnessed something very unique and something special … Austrian based Edelweiss is a sheer one-off.“– God is in the TV Zine

Alicia Edelweiss is an Austro-British singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, actress and visual artist based in Vienna. She started her musical career as a teenage street musician, hitch-hiking all over Europe for two years. On her quest for freedom and travelling without any money, she pretty soon discovered her passion and talent for music – back then solely armed with a guitar.

Settling in Portugal for a while, she recorded her first EP I should have been overproduced (2013) three weeks after she began writing songs at all, due to a Portuguese friend she had just made that urged her to do so. The 7-track-EP was heavily influenced by the Anti-Folk movement in New York. She also began to play the accordion during her time in Portugal, which soon became her trade-mark. Gradually getting bored by her existence as a hippy punk singer-songwriter, she decided to return to Vienna to explore new ways of performing and story-telling, and while doing so discovered her new love for the circus arts.

While performing a lot solo she was also part of nomadic folk-punk band Old Trees as the accordionist for their tours in 2015, and joined the band of austro-pop singer Voodoo Jürgens from 2016-2020.

In 2016 she released her home-recorded lo-fi debut album Mother, how could you– a sick tragic comedy in 10 acts. She toured solo all over Europe and created experimental solo performances like Komplett im Arsch– a tragic Anti-Opera (2016) or Ich bin eine Ballerina (2018) in which she combined music, dance and the circus arts. In 2018 a documentary was made about her called The Sound of Alicia Edelweiss which followed her concerts and performances for 18 months. In 2018, her performance at the renowned Popfestin Vienna, accompanied by her new band consisting of Lukas Lauermann on cello and Matthias Frey on the violin, was described as “one of the most touching, most intimate and at the same time most entertaining performances of the whole Popfest.”

In 2019 her long-awaited first studio album was released: When I’m enlightened, everything will be better. The release was followed by numerous shows and festivals across Europe.

In 2022 Alicia was the winner of the Hubert von Goisern-Kulturpreis for persistence and talent, and she is amongst the selected artists for the NASOM (The New Austrian Sound of Music) program 2023/24.

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