About Chorus Correspondent
Chorus Correspondent was born from a simple conviction that has stayed with us from the very beginning: great music deserves great writing. We are a group of friends scattered across Switzerland — from the cobblestone streets of Basel to the lakeside terraces of Lugano, from the fog-draped hills of Bern to the buzzing Langstrasse in Zürich — united by a shared obsession with the moment a song breaks into its chorus and everything, briefly, feels perfect.
We are music lovers first, writers second. Some of us came to this project through years of music journalism; others through decades spent behind record store counters or in front of stages at every festival we could afford a ticket to. What we share is a belief that the music scene in Switzerland — and across the broader DACH region — produces artists of remarkable depth, originality, and heart, and that far too little of the world notices. This is our attempt to change that.
The Beginning
It started, as most good things in Switzerland do, at a festival. It was the summer of 2018, and a group of friends had gathered on the slopes of the Gurten — that beloved hill overlooking Bern that transforms every July into one of the most joyful places in the country — for the Gurten Festival. We had been coming here for years, sometimes together, sometimes separately, always leaving with that same feeling: the particular euphoria of discovering something new and knowing, instinctively, that it matters.
That evening, after a transcendent set from a young Bernese artist whose name we had written on our palms so we would not forget it, someone said what we had all been thinking for years: we should write this down. Not just the name, not just a rating on a festival app, but the whole thing — the texture of the evening light, the way the crowd fell silent at exactly the right moment, what it felt like to stand there in the Swiss summer air and hear a chorus you would carry with you for years.
By the time the headliners took the stage, we had the outline of something. Chorus Correspondent. The name came from Lukas, who insisted that a correspondent does not simply report but embodies something — carries a place with them wherever they write from. We would be correspondents of the chorus. Of the moment music becomes more than sound. By autumn of that year, the website existed. By spring of the next, people we had never met were reading it.
The Team
Lukas Meier is from Zürich and has been writing about music since he was seventeen, when he started a fanzine called Schall und Rauch that he photocopied in the basement of his parents' apartment in Wiedikon and handed out at shows. He has a particular love for artists who find the universal in the specific — who write songs rooted in the sounds and landscapes of Switzerland but reach something that resonates far beyond. He sees festivals not as entertainment but as cultural institutions: places where communities form, where artists are tested, and where listeners encounter something that changes them. Lukas has been to Paléo Festival in Nyon every year for more than a decade, and he will tell you with absolute conviction that it is one of the finest music festivals on earth. He is the founding editor of Chorus Correspondent and the person most responsible for the tone and ethos of everything we publish.
Sarah Künzi grew up in Thun and spent her teenage years taking the S-Bahn to Bern for any show she could find a ticket to. She trained as a music teacher and taught for several years before realising that her true passion was not instructing children in the mechanics of music but experiencing it herself and then writing about that experience in a way that made others want to go and hear it too. Sarah brings a musicological perspective to the team — she can explain why a chord progression is beautiful without draining any of the beauty from it — and she is our resident authority on Openair Frauenfeld, which she attends with a devotion that approaches the spiritual. She has seen more acts on the main stage there than she can count, and her reviews from that festival are among the most-read pieces we have ever published.
Marco Ferretti runs a record shop in Lugano that has become one of the finest in the country, stocking everything from classic Italian pop to contemporary Swiss hip-hop, from krautrock rarities to the latest releases from emerging Zürich artists. Marco grew up in a household where music was always playing — his father was a semi-professional musician who played in dance bands across the Ticino and into northern Italy — and he developed a collector's instinct for finding the rare and the exceptional before anyone else noticed. He writes in both Italian and German and brings an Italian-Swiss sensibility to our coverage that regularly uncovers angles the rest of us would have missed entirely. He is our primary correspondent for the Blue Balls Festival in Lucerne and for everything happening in the Ticino music scene.
Anna Frei is the visual and aesthetic intelligence behind Chorus Correspondent. Born in Basel and trained as a graphic designer, she is responsible for the way this website looks and feels — which means that if you find it beautiful to read, that is Anna's achievement, not ours. But Anna is also one of our finest writers, and some of the most vivid concert reviews on this site come from her. She has a remarkable ability to describe the visual and physical dimension of a live performance — the lighting, the staging, the movement of a crowd through a field at dusk — in language so precise you feel you were there even if you were not. She is our regular correspondent for Stars in Town in Solothurn and for the Heitere Open Air in Zofingen, two festivals she returns to every year with the dedication of a pilgrim.
Tobias Schär is from St. Gallen and works in technology by day, which means he is the one who keeps the lights on at Chorus Correspondent while the rest of us argue about set lists. But Tobias is also a deeply serious music fan with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the Swiss electronic and club scene — a world that operates largely below the radar of mainstream music coverage but produces some of the most inventive music in the country. He has a particular passion for the ways in which Swiss producers and DJs have quietly built one of the most interesting underground scenes in Europe, and he writes about that scene with knowledge and commitment. He is also the one who always seems to know, six months before anyone else, which artist is about to have their moment.
Nina Hofmann is originally from Geneva and writes primarily about artists from the French-speaking part of Switzerland — a musical world that is sometimes overlooked in German-language music coverage but produces artists of remarkable quality and originality. Nina's French is as effortless as her German; she also speaks fluent English and has a gift for finding the artists who operate in the fascinating border zones between Swiss French, Swiss German, and international music cultures. She is our correspondent for Paléo, which she covers alongside Lukas, and she has developed a particular expertise in the Lausanne and Geneva scenes, which she navigates with the confidence of someone who has been going to shows there since adolescence.
Together, we cover Swiss music from its German-speaking heartland to its French and Italian peripheries — and increasingly, we look outward to the Austrian and German scenes that share so much with Switzerland in temperament, sensibility, and the particular seriousness with which the DACH region has always approached music-making. The team has grown organically, with new voices joining when they feel right rather than when we advertise for them. The people described above are the core, but Chorus Correspondent has always been a conversation, and conversations have a way of drawing in new participants.
What We Write About
Chorus Correspondent is, first and foremost, a festival blog. This is not because we think the studio does not matter — it does, enormously — but because we believe the live experience is where music reveals itself most completely. A song that sounds merely interesting on a streaming platform can become transformative in a field at midnight when the right crowd surrounds you and the air smells of summer grass and something is happening on stage that you will spend years trying to describe. We have all had that experience, multiple times, at Swiss festivals. It is why we started writing, and it is what drives us still.
We write concert reviews, artist profiles, festival overviews, and occasional longer essays on the state of Swiss and DACH music. The festivals we cover regularly include Paléo in Nyon, the Gurten Festival in Bern, Openair Frauenfeld, Zürich Openair, the Blue Balls Festival in Lucerne, Heitere Open Air in Zofingen, Summerdays Festival in Arbon, Stars in Town across multiple Swiss cities, and a number of smaller events that we follow because they consistently produce the most interesting bills. If an artist has played a Swiss stage at any point in the years we have been operating, there is a good chance someone on our team was there, and there is an even better chance they came home and wrote about it.
Our interest is not limited to Swiss-born artists. Switzerland has always been a country that attracts music — from the international stars who have made their homes here over the decades to the immigrant communities whose musical traditions have quietly shaped the local scene in ways that mainstream coverage rarely acknowledges. We write about all of this. We are as likely to profile a Zürich rapper whose parents came from Kosovo as we are to write a deep-dive on a classic Swiss rock band from the 1980s. What matters to us is the quality of the music and the honesty of the intent.
We also follow the DACH scene closely — German and Austrian music that shares so much with Switzerland in language and sensibility, even when it differs in style and attitude. The exchange between Switzerland and its northern and eastern neighbours has always been creatively fertile, and some of the artists we have written most enthusiastically about have been German or Austrian acts who toured through Swiss festivals and reminded us that the language we share produces music of extraordinary variety and range.
Why Choruses
Our name, Chorus Correspondent, is a statement of values. We love choruses. Not just the musical structure — the repeated section, the hook, the release after a verse that has been building tension — but what the chorus represents: the moment of universality, the place in a song where the singular becomes shared, where private feeling becomes communal experience. Music at its best does something that no other art form can do with quite the same efficiency: it takes something that belongs entirely to you — your longing, your grief, your inexplicable joy on an ordinary Wednesday morning — and reveals, in the span of four bars, that it belongs to everyone. That is the moment we are always looking for, in the studio and on the stage. That is what we are always trying to describe.
Switzerland is a country of correspondents, in a sense. Its geography has always made communication across distance — across valleys and language barriers and the particular social formalities of different cantons — something that requires effort and intention. We take that seriously. We write for readers in Zürich and Geneva, in Lucerne and Brig and Chiasso, and for readers elsewhere in the world who want to know what is happening in a music scene they do not yet know well enough. We try to be the kind of writers who make you feel that you have been somewhere, heard something, understood something new — whether you were in the crowd or reading from a thousand kilometres away.
If you have read this far, you probably already care about music in the way we do. We are glad you are here. Read the blog, disagree with us, come back when we have got something new to say. The best music scenes are built by people who argue about them, and we are more than happy to start an argument.
All individuals named in this text are entirely fictitious and do not represent real people. The names, backgrounds, cities, and biographical details described above have been invented to protect the identities of the people behind Chorus Correspondent.