Avalon Emerson & the Charm ・ Pop-Kultur Festival 2026

August 24–30, 2026 | silent green Kulturquartier, Festsaal Kreuzberg, Kulturbrauerei, Pierre Boulez Saal, and more 

Live concerts, experimental music formats, talks, and more. You can look forward to international and local artists, world premieres, and music in all its forms—from large stages to intimate club shows.

Avalon Emerson has never settled comfortably into a single sound. Hailing from the warehouse scene of her hometown, San Francisco, she moved to Berlin in 2013, earned a Berghain residency, and from there established herself worldwide as an unpredictable DJ who rejects routine, seeks out experimentation, and knows how to entertain with euphoria. Her sets reimagine and interweave house, techno, new wave, disco, and obscure rave tracks; older dancefloor classics are thus woven together with contemporary approaches. Emerson insists on fluidity as a conscious artistic rejection of stagnation. She rejects any form of pigeonholing—her sound and life narrative are as free as possible. This also includes the fact that, in addition to DJing, she founded her own band, Avalon Emerson & the Charm, in 2023. While her self-titled debut was still marked by a tentative exploration of her own voice and a sound that oscillated between indie and electronica, this year’s follow-up, *Written into Changes*, released on her own label Another Dove (which she runs together with Nic Tasker of AD 93), of a musician who has found her voice. Much like her DJ sets, the artist—who now lives in New York—shares with us both abrasive dance moments and radically stripped-down, almost bare songs. “Written into Changes” reflects our genre-fluid present. You can tell from the album that songwriting now comes just as easily to Emerson as her DJ sets—it has become part of her DNA. The artist’s heartfelt comment on the new album: “I am so blessed to have this life on Earth, and that’s why I should make the most of it.”