About skug

skug

skug is a Viennese music magazine whose name — always written in lowercase — stands for subkultureller Untergrund, subcultural underground. Its full title is skug – Journal für Musik. It appeared in print quarterly from 1990 to 2015, publishing 104 issues in total, the first on 10 October 1990. It had an online presence from 2000 and has been published online only since November 2015. Published by the Verein zur Förderung von Subkultur, the Association for the Promotion of Subculture, it is described as Austria's longest-existing non-profit music magazine. It covers music from pop through jazz to classical music, and beyond music all areas of culture, especially film, art and literature, as well as politics. Its authors founded the Austrian music archive Skug Research in 1993, and it runs the Salon skug event series in Vienna.

The first issue, 10 October 1990

The cover of the first issue of skug, dated 10 October 1990, is reproduced in reference sources as the magazine's founding document. skug began as a quarterly print magazine from Vienna at the start of the 1990s, a moment when Austrian independent and electronic music was about to gain unusual international attention. The name chosen for it — an acronym of subkultureller Untergrund — declared its territory: not the commercial centre of the music business but the scenes, clubs, small labels and independent venues underneath it.

From the beginning skug was a non-profit, association-published project rather than a commercial launch. Alfred Pranzl is listed in reference sources as its publisher (Herausgeber) and Frank Jödicke as editor-in-chief, with the publishing body given as the Verein zur Förderung von Subkultur. That structure allowed the magazine to follow its enthusiasms without having to satisfy newsstand economics, and it helps explain both its longevity and its eventual decision to leave print when the economics of a free, volunteer-driven quarterly no longer worked.

104 print issues, 1990 to 2015

skug appeared quarterly in print from 1990 to 2015 and reached 104 issues before the print edition was discontinued in November 2015. Twenty-five years of quarterly publication is a substantial run for any independent music magazine, and reference sources note the consequence: skug is Austria's longest-existing non-profit music magazine. The print years spanned the transformation of the music it covered — the magazine's own chroniclers describe how it mirrored the changes of the music world, moving from a guitar-heavy publication toward electronic music as Vienna's electronic scene rose to international prominence in the 1990s.

A contemporary judgement quoted in reference sources captures skug's reputation in the German-speaking music press: the magazine, driven by an unmistakable ambition, was gladly called the little brother of the German magazine Spex. The comparison flatters and defines at once — like Spex, skug treated pop music as a subject for serious, argumentative writing that connected music to art, theory and politics.

Online since 2000, online-only since 2015

skug went online in 2000, fifteen years before print ended, and published in both forms until November 2015, when it continued as an online magazine only. That long overlap means the transition was evolutionary rather than a collapse: the website, skug.at, had already become a daily working tool for its writers and readers while the quarterly provided the collected, considered edition. Since 2015 the online magazine has carried the whole publication, and its archive now runs to more than ten thousand articles, a figure the magazine itself cites when describing its work.

The online magazine remains a non-profit, donation-supported publication. Its pages carry an appeal for donations to the Verein zur Förderung von Subkultur, underlining that skug's model — independent, advertising-light, reader- and supporter-funded — survived the move from print intact.

Music from pop to classical, culture beyond music

skug's documented coverage is unusually wide for a music magazine. It deals with music from pop through jazz to classical — E-Musik in the German term — and with all areas of culture, in particular film, art and literature, but also politics. Its own description of its mission, written for an event at the Künstlerhaus Wien, is to connect music, art, film and dance with political analysis, to track down scenes and make them visible, and to treat art as something that transports, comments on and even seeks to change the world rather than as mere decoration.

That breadth produces characteristic skug material: long interviews and essays on Viennese punk history, histories of Austrian electronic music such as the phonoTAKTIK festival story, coverage of hip-hop acts like Texta that combines scene history with aesthetic argument, and criticism that moves freely between a club night, a gallery and a cultural-policy debate. Readers expecting only record reviews will find them, but inside a magazine whose real subject is subculture as a whole way of making art and life.

Skug Research, founded 1993

In 1993 authors of skug founded Skug Research, the Austrian music archive associated with the magazine. The archive grew out of the magazine's documentary impulse: a publication that writes about scenes that mainstream institutions ignore also has to preserve their traces. Skug Research is recorded in reference sources as a foundation of skug's authors, and it stands as one of the clearest examples of the magazine's role beyond publishing — skug did not only report on Austrian subcultural music history, it built infrastructure to keep that history available.

The archive and the magazine together illustrate why skug's non-profit form matters. A commercial title has little reason to maintain an archive of music that was never commercially successful; an association dedicated to subculture has every reason.

Salon skug

skug's event series, Salon skug, holds regular events in Viennese venues such as rhiz, fluc and Venster99, combining panel discussions on current cultural-policy questions with concerts by local artists. Since 2021 the summer editions have taken place in public space as Salon skug auf Rädern — Salon skug on wheels. The magazine's event work extends the same mission as its pages: scenes are made visible, cultural politics is debated in public, and local artists are given a stage, with skug acting as curator and host.

Appearances such as skug's participation in the ROTOR series at the Künstlerhaus Wien in December 2024, where it asked how art and culture can be wrested from elites, show the salon format operating inside Vienna's established art institutions as well as in its clubs. Few music magazines anywhere run a continuous public discussion programme of this kind; for skug it is a core activity, not a marketing extra.

Vienna's subculture chronicler

skug's home city is Vienna, and its deepest subject is Vienna's own musical underground. Its coverage of the Vienna electronica wave of the 1990s — when the British magazine The Wire devoted a cover story to Vienna electronica in 1997 and international labels suddenly courted a scene that small Austrian independent labels had served for years — is written from inside that scene, by people who had documented it before the attention arrived. Its later historical work, including extended interviews on Viennese punk history and the squatted houses of the early 1980s, treats the city's subcultural past as serious history worth recording in detail.

That chronicler's role is possible because skug's writers are typically participants as well as observers — musicians, DJs, promoters, archivists and academics writing about their own world. The magazine's authority in Austrian music writing comes from that embeddedness, and its archive effect compounds with every year it survives.

How skug is made

skug is published by the Verein zur Förderung von Subkultur in Vienna and produced as a non-profit magazine, with reference sources listing Alfred Pranzl as publisher and Frank Jödicke as editor-in-chief. It is catalogued in the Zeitschriftendatenbank as ZDB 1361717-5 under its full title skug – Journal für Musik. Its survival across thirty-five years — the magazine itself marked the approach of thirty-five years of existence in 2024 — rests on volunteer and low-paid cultural labour, donations and the institutional patience of an association rather than on advertising or cover price.

Precise staffing, budget and readership figures for skug are not published in the sources used for this profile, and none are invented here. The verifiable structure — association publisher, named publisher and editor-in-chief, print run 1990–2015, online since 2000 — is the reliable skeleton of the magazine's organisation.

skug and Austrian music writing

In Austrian music journalism, skug occupies the position of the independent intellectual: the magazine that writes about pop, jazz and classical music in one breath, that insists on the political meaning of subculture, and that has outlasted every commercial competitor for the underground's attention. The Spex comparison recorded in reference sources places it in the German-language tradition of pop theory, while its event series and its archive make it an institution as much as a periodical.

Its history also tracks the media history of its subject. Founded on paper in 1990, when subculture communicated through print and post, it moved online in 2000 as its scenes did, and became a web-only magazine in 2015 without changing its name, its association or its mission. The underground it was named for changed its technologies; skug changed with it.

Current status

skug continues as an online magazine at skug.at, published in Vienna by the Verein zur Förderung von Subkultur, with new articles appearing continuously and the Salon skug series running in Viennese venues and, in summer, in public space. Its print era is closed and should be described in the past tense — 104 issues, 1990 to 2015 — while the magazine itself is a present-tense publication whose archive of more than ten thousand articles remains freely readable online. For anyone researching Austrian subcultural music from 1990 onward, skug is both a primary source and a guide: the magazine that was there, wrote it down and kept the record.