Music Jury

Björn Reinemer is a musician, concert organiser and has been a member of the Dynamite Konzerte agency for 15 years now.

Having started out as a local collective, the agency now primarily takes care of tour booking, productions and the development of various formats/festivals.

Until 2024, Reinemer worked for the publishing house Voland & Quist and as a board member of beatpol dresden e.V.

Since this year, he has been Artistic Director of Feste der Stadt Radebeul.

After studying PR and communications management, Maximilian Messerle worked for many years as a project manager at a Berlin event and marketing agency, where he was responsible for events, marketing campaigns and corporate communications.

Since the beginning of 2023, he has been working for GEMA in the Key Account Management for Authors (KAMA) department. As Membership Delevopment Manager, he takes care of all kinds of loyalty issues for GEMA members. His main work is the organisation of events, workshops & songwriting camps and the handling of key account issues.

Thanks to his many years of experience with artists and bands and a strong love of music, he is part of the music jury of the Pinot & Rock Festival in Breisach and now also of the International Culture Exchange. The aim of his work is not only to find good music, but also to represent GEMA as an important part of the music landscape.

Simon Alter is Managing Director of the Berlin agency Handshake Booking. After working as a freelance sound engineer, data analyst at Universal Music and music manager, he founded the agency Musszo Booking in 2015, which recently merged with Handshake Booking in February 2024.The merger of the two agencies means that Handshake Booking is now one of the largest independent agencies for jazz and global pop in Germany with around 75 national and international acts and also organises the Honey Lake Sessions Festival near Kiel.In addition, Simon Alter works as a freelance lecturer (including at the Popakademie Mannheim), is a speaker on various panels on booking topics, took over the production management of Jazzwoche Berlin in 2021 and curated the Kunstflecken Festival Neumünster 2022 and 2023 as external festival director.

Sonia Loenne sings, composes, recently also plays drums and lives in Bern, where she studied jazz singing and contemporary composition at the jazz faculty of the University of the Arts. She was born in Nice, France in 1996 and moved to Leipzig, Germany in 1997. This has permanently confused her linguistically. As a result, she has been working with poetry, improvisation and theatre in addition to music for several years. She released her first two albums in 2022. Sonia is also active as a composer in contemporary classical and experimental music and has written for ensembles in Switzerland, Germany and France. In the past, Sonia worked a lot in the theatre - this increasingly influences her artistic work. Interdisciplinarity is not a conscious focus of her work, it just happens.