| Farmers Manual | |
| Alias: | farmersmanual |
| Origin: | Vienna, Austria |
| Years Active: | 1995–present |
| Label: | Mego, Tray, OR, and more |
| Associated Acts: | CD Slopper Gcttcatt pxp Martin Ng Russell Haswell |
| Website: | web.fm |
| Current Members: | Mathias Gmachl Stefan Possert Oswald Berthold Gert Brantner Nik Gaffney |
Farmers Manual is an electronic music and visual art group, founded in Vienna in the beginning of the 1990s. The core members of the collective are Mathias Gmachl, Stefan Possert, Oswald Berthold, Gert Brantner, and Nik Gaffney. Part of the very lively Viennese electronic music scene of the 1990s, Farmers Manual were successfully crossing the boundaries between electronic music, live visuals, experimental graphics, and web design for Zeta Industries.
Their CDs, published through avant-garde labels such as Mego, Tray, and OR, often contained multimedia content. Their most significant release might be RLA (which stands for "Recent Live Archive"), a DVD released on Mego in 2003, which contains the band's extensive backcatalogue of live concert recordings from 1995 to 2003, compressed in MP3 format - totalling 3 days and 20 hours of audio content and released under a Copyleft licence.
As visual artists, Farmers Manual have been included in numerous international festivals, such as FCMM (Montreal, 1999), Avanto (Helsinki, 2001), Art+Communication (Riga, 2006) https://web.archive.org/web/20110722164424/http://rixc.lv/06/en/img14.html.
Note: this album, by Farmers Manual member Oswald Berthold, was awarded an Honorary Mention at Ars Electronica 2002.