The concert poster is urban material. Layered endlessly on top of one another, scraped off, and re-glued by the rain, it stretches like skin across the city walls in Leipzig. And there, too, a hum emanates from this skin: the blend of all the music conveyed by the individual posters—a wild mix of genres—is now merely a vague background noise for the new arrivals, freshly conjured onto the wall overnight, to which everything now bows in awe. One could say that Leipzig’s poster tradition does not end with the demise of the large printing workshops—and certainly not in the feuilleton but continues on the streets, on countless cracked brick walls, the windows of abandoned stores, and unofficial billboards. Always accompanied by this distinctive hum of music.

For Holob, the posters are not merely a means to an end but both a tool for orienting oneself in a city in constant flux and a field for graphic experimentation. Within this physically ephemeral yet formally clear framework, typography and illustration spontaneously come together here. For more than ten years now. And for the past five of those, he’s also called one of these cassette labels his own—labels that, surprisingly, seem to be popping up like mushrooms right here in this city. But Holob wouldn’t be Holob if he hadn’t found his own little niche within a niche here as well: “Cassettendienst” pays just as much homage to the artwork and packaging of its releases as it does to the music they contain. Therefor he is either designing and drawing himself, or he connects musicians and designers to create something special together.

Now—for his exhibition at Xao—Holob raided his archive and shows a selection of riso- and offset-printed posters he drew for various venues and gigs as well as hand printed silkscreens for bands and tours. Also most of the cassette objects that were released on “Cassettendienst” will be on display. The Leipzig punk band “Kröte“ will play live on the opening and re-releasing their long sold-out debut album “drive-by“ which came out in 2024 on Cassettendienst in a limited xao-Edition.

Markus Färber aka Holob was born in a small town in the frankonian forest and later on studied illustration and comics in Kassel, Lisbon and Halle. He is part of the „No:Books“-artbook-collective and co-founder of the artist collective „Busy Hands“ which since 2020 organizes the „Busy Hands Fest“—an annual festival for Gig Posters and music-related art. He is now living in Leipzig where he works as a freelancer in illustration and poster design. In 2023 he became the artistic assistant of the illustration department at the art school Burg Giebichenstein in Halle where he is teaching together with prof. Georg Barber (ATAK).