once more with feeling

A cold, cold day in Vienna. A huge area on the outskirts of the city. As big as the 6th district, that’s what we’ve been told. Small one-way roads lead you past psychatric, orthopedic and neurologic departments. It’s still early, but time pressure and the cold makes everybody work fast. A video has to be shot. A video for Toph Taylor aka Trouble Over Tokyo.

I’ve been working in the marketing department of a furniture store for three years, so I’ve been to a lot of shootings before – for print ads, TV ads and all that stuff. But this was the first time I was part of a music video shooting. And it was all different.

The setting they chose was incredible. An abandoned building with broken sinks, cobwebs and decayed wood paneling and an operating room looking like the ones from the first season of ER.

Even though there were some aggravating circumstances (no heating on the first day, no good coffee, masks that made seeing what you’re doing pretty impossible) the result is really amazing. Hard work does pay off.
Maybe you’ll get to see some more making-of pictures soon, I’ll for sure let you know.

Trouble Over Tokyo – “Kryptonite” Official Music Video from Toph Taylor on Vimeo.

I tore the mask from my face and I replaced it with a blank page
And I let everyone else decide the colour of my veins.

Napster. Do you remember it? Napster was the first program I had for downloading music. Illegally. I stopped buying CDs, because (nearly) everything I wanted was available for free, and only one click away from me having it. In my hometown Kufstein, the only record store we had closed in my early teenager-years. There was no Saturn or Media Markt, and I was still quite suspicious of ordering records via the Internet.
However, I always wanted to also have every record physically. This is why I burned everything, and even created the cover exactly like the “real” record looked like.
Then, I moved to Vienna. I started going to concerts, and I started to buy CDs again. I realized that buying music gives you a good feeling, because you know that you’re supporting the artists, because it tells the artists that you appreciate their music, that they should keep going.
What makes me happy is when artists take their records as serious as I do. When they put hard work in the creation, when the whole thing is more than a 2-sided leaflet with some “Thank you” notes and a disk with a couple of songs on it. When you have the feeling that it’s worth every cent. Austrian bands are quite good in that. Just think about Toph Taylor‘s amazing CD-book or Destroy, Munich‘s latest release full of pictures and the images of handwritten lyrics. And on Wednesday, I found another piece of music no one should be missing in his record collection.

It’s the first EP of diver. Remember? Yes, it’s the band I’ve been enthusing about since last summer. I promised you to be hearing more of them. And I was right. After having played as support for Trouble Over Tokyo, they now opened for Francis International Airport. I was standing in the second row (as usual) and overheard some girls talking about how amazing they are, that the cute singer is Wolf from Deckchair Orange, and they even knew some song lines. Yes, diver are on their way to Austria’s indie-elite.

Their EP is a masterpiece of self-made artwork. A retro-style cover that has been sewed together by a friend of the band and a CD in the look of a vinyl disc. The 20 copies they brought to the concert on Wednesday were sold out in about 5 minutes, but they are already producing the next edition. So you can either write them an e-mail (wearediver (at) gmail (dot) com) saying that you really really have to have the record as soon as possible or you come to one of their next gigs (28.2. Scherbe/Graz, 14.3. rhiz/Wien, 20.3. Flex Café/Wien) and get it there. And until that, you can always listen to the songs on their Facebook page and take a look at the amazing pictures of the gig on Wednesday at the gap.