K-Town Hardcore Fest
I never traveled for punk fests like an early-2000s-style anti-globalization summit-hopper, but I have definitely been to my fair share. K-Town Hardcore Fest has always stood out for me. I've been twice: once in 2018 while driving GAZM and CELL on tour, and last year playing bass with TOTAL NADA. It's big, but not too big, with all the official shows happening at a single venue (the infamous Ungdomshuset), with an additional matinee or two happening off-site (including of course the BIKE WARS!). It's all extremely well organized, draws the most international crowd and lineup I've experienced, and (most importantly for me) has very clear DIY political consciousness.
So, in November last year I was extremely encouraged to see K-Town Hardcore Fest show up in my Mastodon feed with a shiny new Pixelfed account, announcing their intention to leave Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Here at Counterforce HQ we were already in the stages of planning Fediverse Punk Month for January 2026. Getting off corporate social media really is in the air! So I reached out to the organizing collective, hoping I could get an interview done in time for January (and before they are completely overwhelmed with planning K-Town Hardcore Fest 2026!).
Thank you to Christina and Mathias for quickly getting these answers back to us!
First, I would like to give readers some context in case they are not familiar with K-Town Hardcore Fest. Can you give a brief history of the fest? How did it start, and how is it organized today? What makes it special among punk fests?
Christina: As I am the only member still in the group from back then, I’ll try to recap this one. The festival started out somehow by chance, in 2001. It was the same year as the EU summit in Gothenburg in Sweden. Back then, the EU summits were always a big draw internationally. We knew a lot of people would be traveling through Copenhagen to get there, so we decided to make two gigs we had already booked, into a mini festival “after the Gothenburg apocalypse” (or something like that!) and invite people traveling back from the protests to stay in Copenhagen for a few days. All the proceeds would be donated to the Anarchist Black Cross in the efforts needed to support expected prisoners after the riots which were more or less guaranteed to happen back then.
We spent the following months booking a handful of bands, organized a Reclaim The Streets protest and a Food Not Bombs event as part of the program and started spreading the word. We brought posters and flyers with us around Europe and to the protests that we were also attending ourselves and encouraged our friends to copy and distribute locally. It worked – and lots of people joined. I can’t tell you how it went through, cause I ended up in prison in Gothenburg and needed the assistance of ABC, haha.
I think that what makes K-Town special is that we are anchored in Ungdomshuset, and that it is 100% run by volunteers. That’s our main countercultural social center/venue in Copenhagen. This means that we are also anchored in politics and our way of organizing the festival reminds a lot of how we would organize a political event. We always had political workshops during the day, soup kitchens with cheap vegan food and often organized demonstrations in connection with the festival. For the first eight years we even offered accommodation in shared sleeping spaces for all the traveling people.
The festival was organized in the old Ungdomshuset from 2001-2006. In March 2007 the house was evicted, and the following two years were spent first on the streets, fighting for a new house and subsequently building our new space (the new Ungdomshuset). In 2007 and 2008, the festival was held in Christiania in The Grey Hall. Christiania is a “Free Town” in Copenhagen (do an internet search – it’s a long story). Those two years were a collective punch in the gut, and when 2008 was done, 90% of the collective were so burnt out that they quit. The festival attendance was extreme, and the interest in all Ungdomshuset-related events were massive.
We realized through those years, how important it is to have your own space on your own terms, where you are able to build something that the guests will also take ownership of. In Christiania we were “just” guests, and as a result people disrespected the place and, to some extent, us as a collective. It was nightmarish and the problems were endless. And because of that we “killed” the festival in 2009 and did a political workshop festival instead (we called it “DIY Festival”) with just two bands playing, if I remember correctly. In 2010 we restarted and have been going ever since, only taking a weird dive in the Covid era where we did a mini “seated festival” outdoors (with Covid restrictions) and a downscaled regular indoor Covid edition the year after, also with restrictions.
I'm in North America, where the dominant social media platform for DIY punks is Instagram, with some scenes still relying on Facebook events as well. What do you find are the main social media platforms used by punks in your local Copenhagen scene, and/or the broader international scene around K-Town Hardcore Fest?
Christina: When social media first started really getting used in the scene, Facebook was the main go-to. MySpace was also a thing, but it wasn’t until “events” could be made through Facebook that it really took off. These days I’d say that Instagram is the dominant platform. Facebook is slowly dying out, but still used by some. For a long time, gigs have been promoted on both those platforms in different ways, trying to maximize traction I guess.
We are lucky that we have always had our own platforms as well. We’ve had the ktownhardcorefest.org website for many years now, and Ungdomshuset.dk is a long running and well functioning website with a lot of traffic as well.
Mathias: Yeah it’s definitely Instagram. Facebook is being ‘kept alive’ by its event page functionality, but even that is dying out. It used to be like you could sort of trust the amount of attendees or guests listed on Facebook, but you can’t even do that any more…
K-Town Hardcore has been around since 2001, and platforms like Facebook and Instagram have only existed since 2004 and 2010, respectively. With such a deep history, I'm wondering if the collective's organizational memory remembers what organizing the fest was like before Meta's platforms came to dominance in punk, and if you have any thoughts or insight on how we got to where we are now?
Christina: When we started the fest back in 2001, we hardly had any digital platforms to rely on. The group back then was composed of extremely active people who played in bands, ran labels, booked gigs and tours and traveled a lot for both music and politics. The festival was a natural continuation of all that. We started promotion early, with “pre-posters” to spread the word about dates, and another round of posters and flyers as soon as the lineup and program was set. Flyposting was mandatory and we would bring posters and flyers with us everywhere. All touring bands coming through Ungdomshuset got a stack and were asked to put them up along their tour route. We also sent packages with posters and flyers by mail to all the main squats and venues around Europe that we worked with. We relied on people wanting to help us out and I think it contributed to the sense of being part of something, when you were helping your “sister festival” advertising beforehand. I still see those posters on the walls of squats and venues across Europe, even though less people bring them around these days. I miss the connections we made back then. The sense of community and networking that was so much more concrete, and longer lasting than it is today – maybe because it came along with commitment and human interaction?
I think that convenience plays a big part in why we are where we are today. We started using social media to gain access to a different arena, but I think a lot of people forgot how valuable the arena they left behind really was. I remember how everyone was raving about how cool it was with Facebook, and how you could invite everyone interested “personally” to a gig. I think a part of the reason why we haven’t spent all these years developing our own platforms, is that the most skeptical people tend to lean toward a less digital community and instead of embracing the digital opportunities, they’re shunned or ignored instead of captured and reshaped to fit our political goals and values. I think I belong in that category myself, to be honest.
K-Town has never been a standalone event. We’ve always been a big part of our community, active with booking gigs and the scene around Ungdomshuset. We’ve always had many talks about how to build communities and how to offer a way into activism, politics and music for newcomers. We’ve maintained a rule about analog advertisement to this day, because we recognize that only nourishing your echo chamber doesn’t build bigger and stronger scenes. We need to also catch the person finding something they didn’t know they were looking for until they found it – like so many of us did when we first started coming to gigs. You are obligated to make printed posters and flyers for your gigs when booking at Ungdomshuset. And a big part of that, is that we want to be visible to the people who are not like us, and to the potential new friends out there. We want to be a visible thorn in the eye of established society and a continuous reminder that we are here and not going anywhere. Visibility is a powerful political tool.
I think we realize the reach social media has given us, and that reach is most definitely something we will have a hard time getting by without. But then again …
Mathias: I am a bit younger than Christina, and while I do remember growing up in a time without omnipresent internet life or activity, I don’t remember organizing gigs or festivals before Meta’s platforms. When I first got involved in doing gigs, Facebook was big in Denmark, and when I got involved in K-Town many years later it was huge.
Back when I joined K-Town, it felt like a natural extension of our website to have a Facebook account and event page, and I am pretty sure that that would also show in the data. We had far more traffic on the Facebook posts and in the comments section on the event page than on our website, and that must have rewired our brains into thinking that ‘this is where we should focus our energy’. Incidentally that meant a lot more work, answering questions and DM’s and figuring out the best times to post stuff, managing debates, banning scam ticket sellers, etc. After a few years we tried to avoid interacting with DMs and comments and instead divert traffic back to our website and our FAQ section, but that didn’t really go as well as it could have.
Despite this, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, we made an Instagram account and that started to take off. In the last four years or so we have gotten quite insane reach and interactions on our posts etc – something I find both fascinating but also really weird, honestly.
Long story short we fell into a trap and were seduced by the magical numbers (data) and marketing lingo telling us that we should be where our audience is. Our journey was like this: Word of mouth > Internet/website > Facebook > Instagram > hopefully some new place that is less corporate and awful. Now we are ‘lucky’ to be in a position where a lot of people know what we are (about) and will willingly seek out information about the fest, no matter if it’s on our own website or a new platform like Pixelfed.
K-Town Hardcore Fest's statement on leaving Meta
Beyond what's in the statement, what was the motivation behind K-Town Hardcore Fest taking this position at this time? ("It was a long time coming...") Was it a matter of alternatives getting better/more awareness on your part of alternatives? Or Meta's platforms and dominance becoming intolerable? Was there a recent singular event or series of experiences (either positive or negative) that really drove the decision?
Mathias: We started talking about leaving Meta sometime in the early planning stages of K-Town Hardcore Fest 2025. We usually start planning the next edition of the fest by the end of a year, so that talk would have happened around November/December 2024 (maybe January 2025). The initial plan was to announce us leaving Meta, while at the same time using the same platforms to announce everything related to K-Town 2025. So one day we would announce some bands, and in the next post we would encourage everyone to leave with us to Pixelfed, but things got in the way of our planning... I think there were several catalysts of why we wanted to leave, but the overall influence of the internet was one of the bigger trigger points.
Christina: I think we’ve all been sick of what social media has done to our community, for a long time. Sure, it’s been great for mobilizing and spreading awareness, but it’s also been a superb tool for division, miscommunication and slander. Being positioned on the political radical left, it’s almost unbearable to see the commercialization and capitalization of punk that the SoMe era has boosted. We’re far from the days of BYOFL (Book Your Own Fucking Life) where personal contact and networking were key elements of the international punk community. Now you are almost forced to use influencer tools, pay for boosts and use strategic communication to even be seen by some, because you’re fighting against corporate algorithm tricks. Urgh. I long back to a time where active participation was key. And it’s a sad truth that most punks are just consumers now.
What drove the decision was a mix of the new reality we all faced when the yellow baby was elected again and all the tech bros lined up behind him, and the general things Mathias is also mentioning. We saw people starting to make coordinated exits, some of us exited ourselves, and it led us to have a look in the mirror and ask the question: can you defend being the oxymoron it is to be a political DIY festival, doing your main promotion on big tech platforms??
Sometimes making big decisions as a large collective can be difficult. Without hashing out any internal conflicts, can you say if this was a contentious decision among the collective? Were there holdouts or people skeptical or opposed to the idea? If so, what eventually won them over?
Christina: I think it’s fair to say that we are all a bit nervous about the move. There’s not been grave opposition within the group, but for sure some people feel more energetic about it than others.
Mathias: I wasn’t super sold on the idea of leaving in the beginning, as I liked having a direct platform from which we could engage directly with our audience. I thought we were saying goodbye to too much, by leaving…
Christina: Yeah, I think it’s a delicate balance between choosing what’s right and what’s convenient. We have more than 11,400 followers on Instagram, for example. I don’t think anyone really disagrees with the fact that the big tech companies have way too much power over punk, and that the right thing to do is to abandon them and take back control. But how to do this is another question. We’re “just” a punk festival. We’re not a network of radical internet activists. And our main priorities lies in making our festival as good as possible, while being a positive example within our community, so that people will hopefully be inspired to stay or become radical themselves. But will we change or inspire, if no one's looking?
I think idealism won in the end. And it’s a gamble, if it will truly work. But we choose to believe that it will and that we are an “established” enough event, to survive the setback in reach we will eventually meet.
I have already really respected that K-Town Hardcore Fest has a comprehensive and useful website. That's somewhat of a rarity these days (at least in North America), although I am happy to see more fests returning to having a functional website instead of relying solely on Instagram. You say you plan to use your website a lot more in the future... What do you have planned?
Mathias: Just to use it more, hah! To have more overall and general information about the fest, bands and tickets and so on. I am the main admin for the site and have to admit that I did a terrible job at keeping it up to date last year. I also really want to give it a visual overhaul soon too.
With regards to Pixelfed/the Fediverse, what has your experience been like so far? Have you found any explanations, resources, or guides that are particularly helpful?
Mathias: It’s still very new, and we haven’t really posted anything yet (but will soon enough). I hope punks will join us on Pixelfed soon – the more we are, the funner it gets, I guess.
Christina: Agree. It’s all still so new, and we rarely post anything this time a year anyways. I guess it was a good time to quit, because it gave us some time to build content and think of ways of communicating, before diving into it. Honestly, we have mostly found the Counterforce guide to be helpful and very inspiring, and I don’t say that just to flatter you – but it’s the first guide I’ve found, directed at punks and DIY organizers. I dare say that you helped us believing we could do this! Thank you for that. In Denmark, the main people interested in this stuff are not punks.
Mathias: The Counterforce zine (manifesto) was pretty inspiring, heh!
Are there any other things you are doing to try and exit Meta this year that you want to expand upon?
Mathias: Not really Meta-related, but we have discussed leaving Google too. I think we should, and that’s gonna be less difficult, I imagine, in terms of whatever ‘feelings’ might be attached to their platforms and services. We are not really saying goodbye to an audience when getting a new email account, right? But we still need time to properly research alternatives, since we are using a lot more applications than just Gmail. We have plans of making a newsletter too. So you can get all news and deadlines regarding K-Town directly in your inbox.
Christina: We are going to let our Instagram page stay up for a while, so people can still find us and see where we went. But the Facebook page will be killed entirely at some point. We will probably use the Instagram page for purposes related to the exit. That way we are not just preaching to the choir, but to the people still on that platform, when talking about the exit. Spreading materials from the Punk Fediverse month is part of that.
Fun fact: We weren’t always on Google mail… our first email address was on Riseup, but at some point (around 2010 as I remember it) they were having loads of problems with their servers and we lost access to our account and weren’t able to recover it. That threw us into the hands of Evil.inc :(
Another thing I really respect about K-Town Hardcore Fest is how international it is, both in the lineup of bands and in the diversity of the attendees. We have to admit that Meta's slick and easy social media has allowed for greater international connections and solidarity than ever before. I think that in moving away from these platforms a major challenge will be maintaining strong international connections between scenes around the world. I wonder if you all have thoughts on this challenge going forward?
Mathias: I think you are right. It’s gonna be a real challenge. Instagram made it soooo convenient to stay in touch with your international friends, or ‘add’ all the new people you met at a festival.
Christina: K-Town has always been international. But in later years it became more than it was before. Like I talked about earlier, we built the first festival on international (mostly European) mobilization, so a lot of people who have been coming every year since the beginning, are international. It was somewhat a coincidence but it’s not one that we regret :)
I like to believe that we share a special connection with the bands, volunteers and guests at the festival. We take great care in making everyone feel welcome and part of the fest. We strive to make people feel equally seen and included, no matter if you scrub toilets or play guitar in the evening closer band. I sincerely hope we succeed in that … Many people choose to come back after having played, as guests the following year, and we have many of the same volunteers coming in from all over the world every year, to participate in the annual family event. This cannot be attributed to social media platforms, but to connections and friendships between people, the feeling of being part of something valuable and important – and having a great fucking time while doing it obviously!
Booking for the 2026 fest has started. What has the experience been like so far with this change? What has the reception been like to your new position?
Christina: With three weeks left before the application window ends, we have 370 bands on our list, so I’d say nothing has changed there, haha. Generally, we have gotten a lot of positive feedback from people. No negative so far, except a bit of “whataboutism” here and there, which is hardly a criticism worth taking in.
On Instagram, we have turned off comments, because we don’t want to interact with the platform any longer, but our posts about the exit have been shared more than usual. We have a feeling that’s not a negative thing.
Mathias: 370 band requests is more than we usually get. For the past years the average has been ~300, so so far so good I guess.
Do you have any other advice for other DIY festivals or other punk projects who want to follow your lead?
Christina: Have good talks about why you want to leave. What does it cost your integrity to stay vs what do you gain by staying? Be brave and risk it. But stop being lazy. Organizing is hard work and we’d be lying if we said it was easy.
Get a website or a blog or use an existing platform, from your local political network, the squat/houseproject/venue you’re hosting at or whatever digital resource you have available. Make posters and flyers and think of ways to spread them so the people interested in coming will see them ahead of time. Who are your international friends? Who are your friends, locally? Reach out and use your network of friends!
Mathias: Yeah, start by moving away from Meta’s platforms. Pixelfed is almost a 1:1 copy of Instagram, so there’s no real learning curve. You can even import all of your content from Instagram to Pixelfed, so you keep all of your memories, even if you nuke your Instagram profile. Other than that, I agree with what Christina is saying here – and let’s all ditch Google too, ok?
Finally, please hype up the fest! Where can people go to get more into if they want to attend, play, or volunteer? Is there anything else you want to shout out or add?
Christina: Yes! Please find us here:
pixelfed.social/ktownhardcorefest
(to follow from your own account on Pixelfed/Mastodon/the Fediverse, search @ktownhardcorefest@pixelfed.social)
Subscribe to our newsletter for direct mail about lineup, tickets and practical info – we promise we won’t be spamming you.