The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans has never strayed far from the music world. He photographed artists like Aphex Twin and Carl Craig for i-D and The Face in the 1990s and made music videos for Goldfrapp and the Pet Shop Boys; his photographs even hang in Berlin’s iconic Panorama Bar. But Tillmans has a restless eye. His work has encompassed portraiture, still life, quotidian snapshots, and pure photo-chemical abstraction, made without the use of a camera. The fundamental inquisitiveness of his work, which balances a critical sensibility with deep empathy, is reflected in the title of a 2003 exhibition: If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters.
Recently the 50-year-old photographer has been making music, too. In 2016, his 2016/1986 EP marked a return to the synth-pop project he had abandoned 30 years prior; a few months later, before his follow-up EP, Device Control, was even released, the title track turned up in full as the bookending cuts on Frank Ocean’s Endless. Now Tillmans has teamed up with Oscar Powell, aka Powell, a British electronic musician known for his madcap fusion of post-punk and techno. They make an odd fit: Tillmans’ work is distinguished by its stillness and attention to detail, Powell’s by its messiness and discord.
The pair met at Tillmans’ solo show at Tate Modern in 2017. Tillmans was looking for an experienced electronic producer to work with him on his music, and Rodaidh McDonald, a producer at XL, suggested Powell as a likely accomplice. “I realized that I’m crap at production; I’m not really built to make music for other people,” says Powell from his London studio, on a recent three-way call. So instead they fashioned an unusual technique using Tillmans’ voice as raw material for Powell to reshape.
Their EP together, this week’s Spoken By the Other, runs from shimmering synth pop to ominous drone tracks; many of its songs started out as the voice memos and field recordings that Tillmans habitually captures on his phone, which he likens to “sound photographs.” His work has taken on more political overtones recently—in 2016, he launched a poster campaign against Brexit and in defense of the European Union—so there is a subtle sense of activism to the EP. At a time when the Western political order feels more at risk than ever, the collaboration makes for something like a plea for democracy itself. They might as well have called it If One Sound Matters, Every Sound Matters.
Oscar Powell: When we started out, it was basically gridded dance tracks that Wolfgang would sing over. But something about the vulnerability in his voice pushed me to explore new territory for myself. We still had this one dance-y track on it, and something was bugging us about the record. Wolfgang said, “I think we should lose that last track.” That was the final nail in the coffin for where we’d been before.
Wolfgang Tillmans: I write music in a non-organized, intuitive way. Lines of melody and words come to me and I note them on a voice recorder. Then I would send them to Oscar. “Speak Out,” for example, is a vocal I’d been working with and Oscar found a way to make it his own through this super intense feedback loop.
OP: When I was in the studio with my mixing engineer, exploring the “Speak Out” vocal with a Tiptop Z-DSP stereo processing module, it overloaded and froze, and it just started pounding out this drone comprised of Wolfgang’s voice. It kept going and going, and we just hit record—and that was the finished track. It was one of the tracks where Wolfgang had his mind set on how it was before. His initial reaction was to send me a furious email, and I just said, “Come on, give it some time.” Three days later, we both liked it.
WT: That’s an interesting connection. The “Silvers” are works I make by feeding photographic paper through a processing machine that I haven’t cleaned or refreshed over months. The accumulation of the silver and materials gets rubbed off onto the paper and creates a picture of particles and smudges, sometimes creating rhythmic lines because of the rollers that transport the paper through the machine. I always felt they had a musical side.
OP: This is the first record I’ve made that truly reflects how I feel about the world and myself. Wolfgang encouraged that, being such an open, soulful person. The simplicity and power in what he was saying, his tenderness, resonated with things that deep down I’d never had to courage to surface. There’s always been a fair amount of humor and bravado in my music, and this was an opportunity to demonstrate something else about myself. That of course makes me very uncomfortable and nervous. We did a listening session with 30 people from Beggars in New York recently. In the past, I’ve found it difficult to play my music in front of big groups of people, but somehow this time I felt completely at peace. Might be because I dropped some CBD beforehand.
WT: I think it’s strangely optimistic. “Tone Me” is not hopeful, but I think the audacity of it is optimistic, futuristic. One of the lines is, “Make something soft,” and there’s this tension between the technological and this longing for something soft. These six tracks haven’t really got a reference in the past, but at the same time, they’re not claiming to be the future, either.
OP: As Wolfgang knows all too well, I’m quite an anxious soul. Maybe the anxiety is a reflection of the times we live in, that some of that seeped into the music.
WT: I think it’s important that we don’t let our art be dominated by the world’s negative aspects. I certainly reflect them, but I don’t want my art to look or sound like them. But we were both strongly feeling what was going on in the last 18 months, so that definitely condensated around the sound and the content. And “anxiety” is probably a good word to describe that state of affairs.
WT: I was always curious about the increasing militarization of policemen in different countries, from the benign Bobby or German policemen with their sloppy, sagging clothes to these machine Robocops that we saw at the Seattle G7 riots. They are supposed to serve us, but they are really soldiers. Of course, this military look is also seductive and attractive, so the video focuses on bums and buttocks. That’s subversive, because the moment you start objectifying and sexualizing the men in uniform, you take away the power of the uniform.
WT: I never had the courage to go back to actually making music. The moment that convinced me was a dinner with Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. Chris was showing me these apps on his iPhone and saying it’s amazing what you could do with these little cheap things, and I said, “Maybe I should get one of these apps.” He said, “No, no, no, no, no, you should get yourself a MIDI keyboard and a [computer] program. You absolutely should do it.” He was so convincing, I thought, well, he doesn’t have to say this. I used a field recording from a printing press which sounded like a techno beat, and that became the backbone to “Make It Up as You Go Along,” which was the first track I released, in 2016.
WT: That was more about questioning your motivations, because ultimately art is free and we are free to do what we want to do. But in terms of why to put it out… I don’t want to campaign, but I’m interested in seeing what happens when you say, “Speak out for your life and for your rights.” Can one say that in 2018, and why was it OK to say something like this in earlier years? What emotions can be expressed, how clear can you be?
OP: Why put something out? I mean, I’m in music from 9 in the morning until 9 at night every day I possibly can. I never really do it with the output in mind. I do it because it makes me feel like I have some purpose, a reason to exist. Working with Wolfgang was an opportunity to leave behind what were becoming bad habits. This collaboration forced me to confront things, to find new processes that have subsequently given me a huge injection of courage and love for what I do.
WT: But your music has always had aspects of withdrawal and not giving what you’re expected to give. And now I can see that it comes from an almost overly critical process. The good thing is, it doesn’t inhibit you. You are generous enough to also give and not only hold back.
OP: [Laughing nervously] This is better than therapy! The thing is, I never consciously refused to hold back. It’s just something I’ve been drawn to, just from listening to music that never goes anywhere. When I first listened to Steve Reich or Mika Vainio, these things that were so focused, it was about that sound. But then, having had some success in music, everything became influenced by [playing] live, and it starts to contaminate you. Suddenly you’re throwing everything at everything, just trying to get a response [from the audience]. Someone I trust and am close to said, “It’s nice to see you letting your music breathe.” I hadn’t realized it, but I’ve remembered how lovely it is to let the sounds speak for themselves.
