Blank Manuskript
Community and loneliness – an auditory journey.
An album cover as an ethnographic reference to the social potential of the individual.
Project Context
Rule number 1: The concept always comes first! Blank Manuskript, Austria’s flagship art rock band, develops all its compositions based on this premise.
The current album used a social self-experiment: Under the working title ‘The Krasna Hora Sessions’, the musicians cast themselves as a group of musicians on a farm in the Czech Republic. The recording of the album follows a perfectly planned, one-take live session without later editing in the studio.
The task for IDL was to design the album cover; a cover that interprets and makes this abstract content tangible using a consistent visual language.
Illustrations of turn of the 19th Century Czech farmland were researched and collated. Combined together, these illustrations show people of different ethnic backgrounds – their differences and similarities, their tools and surroundings – as a group of independent individuals.