farmersmanual

Organization1 listing

About: farmersmanual is an electronic music and visual art group formed in Vienna in the mid-1990s. The core of the loosely organised collective comprises Mathias Gmachl, Stefan Possert, Oswald Berthold, Gert Brantner and Nik Gaffney. With “No Backup” (1996), the first full-length production of the Viennese label Mego, and releases on Tray and OR, farmersmanual became a defining voice of early laptop and computer music. Live performance is at the heart of their work: improvised, networked, often streamed over the internet and combined with real-time visuals, network visualisation and sonification. The DVD “RLA – Recent Live Archive” (Mego, 2003) collects almost four days of live recordings from 1995 to 2003 and was released under a copyleft licence. Performances have taken the group to Berlin Atonal, Avanto Festival in Helsinki and FCMM in Montréal, among others. slonkocytes – dynatropes. “Thanks for keeping electronic music interesting!” (blitstikler, private communication, 2023)