Koa Hiatamadl

An old dance in a new sound

The Hiatamadl is a folk dance well known in Austria and Bavaria. The Oesterreichisches Musiklexikon, the national music encyclopaedia, describes it as a dance set to a particular eight-bar polka melody, with steps that alternate light toe-taps and turns as a couple. The melody, it notes, is much the same wherever it is played, with only small variations, and it gives a folk verse that is sung to the tune.

The title is dialect. German Wikipedia glosses Koa Hiatamadl as "no herding girl", a nod to the name of the dance. The Musiklexikon credits Hubert von Goisern's recording with giving the old Hiatamadl new popularity at the start of the 1990s.

The breakthrough of 1992

The song first appeared in 1992 on Aufgeigen statt niederschiassen, the album that German Wikipedia, the Austria-Forum's AEIOU encyclopaedia and the Munich newspaper Abendzeitung all name as Hubert von Goisern's breakthrough. The same record also introduced Heast as nit and Weit, weit weg.

Koa Hiatamadl was played widely on the radio. German Wikipedia records that it spent 19 weeks in the Ö3 Austria Top 40, peaking at number two, and 14 weeks in the top ten. Reporting IFPI Austria's announcement of his lifetime-achievement Amadeus award, an APA news-agency report carried by the business magazine trend described it as a rock reinterpretation of a folk song that dominated the charts for weeks and marked the start of his artistic career.

It did not reach number one. A dpa report in the Abendzeitung, published the day before his 60th birthday in 2012, noted that Koa Hiatamadl and Heast as nit had made him known beyond Austria in the 1990s, but that his first number-one hit came only in 2011, with Brenna tuats guat.

Hubert von Goisern and the Alpinkatzen

Hubert von Goisern is the stage name of Hubert Achleitner, born on 17 November 1952 in Bad Goisern in the Salzkammergut; the name points to his home town. Before music became his career he worked as a chemical laboratory technician in South Africa and lived in Canada, then studied electroacoustic and experimental music in Vienna.

He founded the Alpinkatzen with Wolfgang Staribacher in 1986. Their first album, Alpine Lawine, made little impact, and after the two parted he continued the project with new musicians, including the singer Sabine Kapfinger, who brought yodelling into the band's sound. AEIOU describes Koa Hiatamadl as a contemporary arrangement of traditional folk music, and the mix of folk with rock and other styles, the same dpa report says, became his trademark.

The Alpinkatzen toured widely before disbanding in 1994. Hubert von Goisern went on to travel widely, including to Tibet and Africa, to tour in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and to sail a converted cargo ship from Linz to the Black Sea on his Linz Europa Tour, and was later given IFPI Austria's Amadeus award for his life's work. In Emblem World the song sits in the Austria music collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.