January 28 – Januar 30, 2011. Morgnaga di Gardone Riviera, Italy. I had a meeting with the band Bilderbuch on Wednesday, January 15th, if I recall correctly. I had known the band for some months, we met each other at live shows and the singer Maurice and I had gone out together two or three times when he called me to ask, if I wanted to do the photos and artwork for their new album. The night before I had the meeting with Bilderbuch and the label, I went to Maurice‘ place to listen to the album for the first time. I was pretty hammered when I arrived at his place and he played the record at a really high level on some crappy speakers in his huge living room. We listened to this loud music for 40 minutes or so and I got kinda dizzy as a result of the intense music, the volume and the alcohol. The first thing I thought was that I wanted to do something really calm and peaceful with the photos and artwork as it was all so hectic and brutal somehow (in a good way though).

I had lost my license a few weeks earlier and planned on going to Italy to renew that eventually. That’s when I thought about the lake of Garda (that’s kinda close to my hometown) and its beautiful west side that isn’t quite as famous as the east side as it doesn’t have as many beaches to easily go into the water. It’s mostly big rocks. Anyways, we had this meeting, I told them my idea about driving to the lake of Garda (also that they would have to drive m car as I didn’t have a license), they were down for the road trip and we started a week later on Friday at 6 p.m. We had three extremely intense days, a combination of almost no sleep and working all day. On Saturday night we celebrated our last night (which was actually also the second night, but well) in the beautiful apartment on a hill right by the lake and decided to shoot a music video to their song „Venezianischer Spiegel“ after we had dropped the previous video idea.We started working right away, it was 3 a.m. It was a weird night as we had to do the whole thing over and over again (it was a one-shot), I started to think that there was a man watching us in the trees close to the place we were filming at, Peter was sure that he had heard a wolf right next to him and yeah…

Some hours later we got up , shot for some more hours, had dinner with my parents in Bolzano and drove back to Vienna, which took us almost all night. When we arrived we took some more pictures and went for another drink. After that we saw each other almost ever day and night as the deadline was so close and I still had to do the artwork, the press photo selection and editing, some other design stuff and the video. It was a very intense and extremely special time for me. If you wanna see the video, look it up on YouTube (Bilderbuch – Venezianischer Spiegel), some press pictures are on my Flickr, on my website and on the website of their label (inkmusic.at). Click the photo to see the whole series, click a photo in the “series view” to see it in even bigger size.