Wolfgang Tillmans has been taking pictures for three decades, beginning with photographs from the Hamburg nightclubs he frequented in late 1980s, published in *i-D *and Prinz, and moving into an expansive practice that earned him the Turner Prize in 2000 and numerous major gallery and museum shows since. Though certainly associated with an eye for European youth subcultures, and youth in general, at the heart of Tillmans’ work is a particular relationship with the world, rather than a consistent subject. Whether abstract color field, an image of sinewy youths embracing, or an urban landscape, the images he makes are imbued with emotional resonance.
Still, music and club culture have long been intertwined with the Berlin- and London-based artist’s work (and life), in ways both nostalgic and decidedly forward-facing. In addition to documenting the early 1990s European acid house scene for i-D, Tillmans’ photographs currently hang in Berghain’s Panorama Bar (he’s allegedly also the one exception to the club’s notorious no-photographs rule), and a recent solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York included pages of a Fade to Mind label profile in German music magazine Spex, featuring his portraits of Kingdom, Kelela, Mike Q, and other label affiliates. He’s also DJed and installed “playback rooms,” spaces equipped with top-of-the line stereo equipment and Tillmans’ own playlists, in galleries and museums. So it’s not altogether surprising that the artist now has what could vaguely be termed a techno release of his own, consisting of a pair of tracks made this year and a trio of recordings from 1986.
The EP starts in the present, opening with what is ultimately its only straightforward dance track, “Make It Up As You Go Along.” A familiar bass groove and upbeat kick drum are met with the shuffling sound of a Heidelberg Speedmaster XL printing press, combining to produce a subtly collaged deep house. While the printing press works to provide a rhythmic spine, it’s Tillmans’ charmingly ungainly vocals—he reiterates the titular phrase and harmonizes with a synth melody—that introduce a degree of instability. It’s a warm and catchy track, but rather than proposing a seamless sublimation into a club environment, it reminds listeners of the conditions of its making—a useful fact, as it turns out, as the song that follows lacks any semblance of a dance vocabulary. “Triangle / Gong / What” follows the literal progression laid out in its title, consisting of a rather minimal sequence of barely-processed sounds: First, the artist plays a triangle, tapping it urgently but irregularly; the tinny crashing gives way to the ambient swell of a gong, at one point quieting to near-stillness. Finally, Tillmans—in a robotic, self-serious monotone—intones the line “what we do here is a crime in most countries. But it’s not. There is no victim. Leave us alone.” It’s a little goofy, particularly in juxtaposition to the jovial track that precedes it.
But his relationship to sound, found and recorded, reminds me of his description in a 2015 interview with Peter Halley of one of his first-ever photographs, Lacanau [self], a self-portrait taken on a French beach in 1986. “It’s a pink shape,” he says, “which is my T-shirt, and then a bit of black, which is my shorts, and then a bit of skin, which is my knee, and then a big space of sand. It’s also my first abstract picture: you can’t make out what it is, but it’s actually totally concrete at the same time.” A compositional element, for Tillmans, can be at once documentary and pure abstraction, and there’s a recurring sense of curiosity in the way he negotiates between the two as he sees—or hears.
The same year that he took Lacanau, Tillmans recorded a series of synth-driven postpunk tracks in a one-night session with Burt Leßmann in Wuppertal, Germany. Restored from their original cassette recordings, three of these songs—with vocals and lyrics by Tillmans and synths by Leßmann—comprise the EP’s B-side. As standalone pop songs, they’re fairly orthodox for the era in which they were produced. However, in addition to their sentimental value (for a fan of Tillmans’ photography, it’s sort of amazing to picture him at age 18 in a rehearsal room in provincial West Germany delivering these affected vocal lines), they temper the meandering restraint of the EP’s A-side with a gust of youthful energy.
Aesthetically cohesive this EP is not, which is, of course, not really its point to begin with—2016/1986’s uneven nature speaks to its status as a less an entry into the club cultures of which Tillmans has long been a part and more a brief aural document of his involvement with and attachment to sound. And that awkwardness is what lends this release its charm, centering the photographer as an enthusiastic experimenter, engaging with memory while using it to produce a colorful present.
