- Wolfgang Tillmans is a 48-year-old German photographer with an era-defining career that will be the subject of a major retrospective at London's Tate Modern in February 2017. He's also a dedicated music fan. Not only have musicians long been his subjects for works shown in exhibitions, he also still regularly shoots artist portraits for music publications such as German Rolling Stone and Spex. His Berlin gallery, Between Bridges, also has exhibitions around records, featuring playback on a high-end soundsystem. If you live in Berlin, you'll see him regularly at clubs and can occasionally catch him DJing.
Device Control is Tillmans' second release as a musician. (The first, 2016 / 1986, came out less than three months ago, and featured music from both titular eras.) The EP's title track appeared on Frank Ocean's Endless visual album—Ocean started Endless with a sample from "Device Control" and ended it by including the entire track. Perhaps Ocean felt an affinity to the song's opening synth ripple, provided by Kyle Combs, which isn't so far from the one on his Channel Orange track "Pyramids." Or perhaps he enjoyed Tillmans' man-machine-esque vocals over its driving beat—made with the aid of Tim Knapp. Two versions of "Angered Son" each consist solely of Tillmans singing essentially the same melody, the vocals looped, layered and vaguely altered. The final three tracks are enjoyable remixes of 2016 / 1986 opener "Make It Up As You Go Along": Salem's drill-n-drag horror theatrics and two versions of Daniel Wang & J.E.E.P.'s poppy disco-house rendering.
Clearly, Tillmans is still feeling his way around this music lark. While his lyrics tackle weighty themes such as technology and the way we interface with it (the clever "Device Control") and queerness/homophobia ("Angered Son"), the melodies he makes with them feel simplistic and stiff. While operating instinctively has made for some incredible photographs, Tillmans could use a bit more fluency in musical language to better translate his ideas, of which he surely has many. Still, it's fascinating to observe a world-class artist in the beginner's stage of what could become another fruitful strand of his career.
Tracklist01. Device Control
02. Angered Son (Live With Kyle Combs)
03. Angered Son (Wolfgang Tillmans Solo)
04. Make It Up As You Go Along (Salem Remix)
05. Make It Up As You Go Along (Daniel Wang & J.E.E.P. Remix)
06. Make It Up As You Go Along (Daniel Wang & J.E.E.P. Dub)