Wolfgang Tillmans has been very busy lately. A survey of his work has just opened at the Carré d’Art museum in Nîmes, France, and two solo shows, in two different continents, just closed last week: one in Hong Kong, at the recently inaugurated David Zwirner gallery in H Queen’s Central, and one in Nairobi, Kenya. Which is, of course, expected from the Turner Prize-winning photographer.
However, for the last two years Tillmans has also been working in a different kind of studio and exploring a somewhat unexpected medium: electronic music. His latest single, “Source,” is out now on vinyl, and available to download or stream, under his own label “Fragile,” with remixes by the legendary German electronic music producer Roman Flügel.
Tillmans’s career as a music producer is more of a return to an original passion, rather than an artistic reinvention. In 1985, two years before he bought his first camera, Tillmans started experimenting with music, which he probably would’ve pursued if it weren’t for fate: “My collaborator Bert [Leßman] left town and I never found the courage to find another. Then I discovered my visual side and began making work with a black and white photocopier. Somehow that took over,” he told me over the phone.
Music has always been present in the artist’s visual work: from his early days documenting club culture in Berlin and London, to spaces that he dedicated entirely to sounds, such as exhibitions at his nonprofit gallery in Berlin and at Tate Modern’s South Tank. But it wasn’t until almost 30 years later that his desire for making music would resurface in a gradual process that started taking form in 2014, when he worked on a video called “Instrument.” “It was a split screen where I’m dancing, playing and making noises with my steps, which creates the rhythm to which I dance to. I manipulated the stepping noises into electronic sound, sort of me being my own instrument.” Through “Instrument” he also met the music producer Tim Knapp, with whom he’s still working today. “It was such a lucky coincidence [to have met]; our studios were literally on the same street. I took him the cassette recordings I’d made in 1986, digitized them and we tried to restore them as well as possible. He replayed the instruments and layered them under the original recording. Those are the songs on my first release, 2016/1986 EP,” which came out in the summer of 2016.