Hannes Liechti lives in Bern, Switzerland, as a popular music scholar/lecturer, curator, cultural producer, and content editor. He is the head of KULT Student Agency at Bern Academy of the Arts HKB. Since 2021, he is part of the executive board of the concert organizer bee-flat and in 2024 he was elected as a member of the Cultural Commission of the City of Bern. Liechti teaches history of popular music at Paderborn University, Germany. From 2013–2024 he worked as a producing manager and as a curator/editor for Norient. He co-published «Seismographic Sounds: Visions of a New World» (2015) and co-curated the corresponding exhibition on global pop. He edited the digital publication «Sampling Politics Today» (2020) and published his PhD on the culture of sampling in experimental electronica with Norient Books (2022). Follow him on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Anja Brunner (born 1980 in Austria) studied Musicology, Cultural Anthropology and German literature at the University of Vienna (Austria). Specializing on ethnomusicology, she completed her master studies with a thesis on the emergence of Mbalax as popular music in Senegal, based on research done in Dakar, Senegal in 2004 and 2005 (published 2010). From 2009 to 2010, she worked in a research project on Balkan music in Austria at the research institute mediacult. Since 2010, she has been employed as university assistant at the Institute of Musicology, University of Vienna (Austria). Currently, she is writing her PhD thesis on the popular music Bikutsi in Cameroon, based on research done in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in 2007, 2008 and 2010.