‘Blue Monday is one of the 20th century’s greatest artworks’: Wolfgang Tillmans on swapping his camera for a microphone

Wolfgang Tillmans never had any intention of releasing music and certainly no intention of playing it live. This is an intriguing thing for the noted German photographer to say given that he’s on a Zoom call from his Berlin home to discuss his second album, Build from Here, which moreover includes a track called Grüne Linien that was recorded live on stage with his band Fragile, at a festival in Fire Island in 2018. Equally, you can see why Tillmans’ musical history may give him pause about, as he puts it, making music “with a direct public intent”. His head was turned by encountering the new romantic scene while on a trip to the UK to improve his English. “British pop music at the time offered such a kaleidoscope,” he enthuses, “combining things that didn’t belong together, from completely different origins: so many things going on at the same time, it was freeing; just the sense that you were allowed to think like this, this is possible, you can do this.”

On his return to Germany, he formed a synth duo in his hometown of Remscheid. But his partner in the duo “disappeared overnight”, leaving town in the aftermath of a troubled relationship. Then, in 1991, he offered to sing with a band while a student in Bournemouth. “A catastrophic failure,” Tillmans says of their solitary gig. “Under-rehearsed, the monitors failed, I couldn’t hear myself and I was out of pitch, out of tune, out of sync, just terrible. A never-again situation.”

Yet it is hard to think of another Turner prize-winning artist whose work is so bound up with pop. The 55-year-old has borrowed titles for works and exhibitions from songs, DJed in clubs and at festivals, and his photographs hang in in Berlin’s Berghain: he is, he proudly announces, the only person who’s ever been allowed to shoot in the notoriously secretive club. He once said he would never have picked up a camera were it not for acid house and its impact on German youth culture: 30 years on, the pictures he took display an uncanny ability to capture the dancefloor’s atmosphere of abandon.

“I think that really came from being one of the revellers,” he says. “The camera was not for me the reason to be there; I briefly took the responsibility of bearing witness to what I experienced. I don’t enjoy being seen with the camera. It’s the same with portraits; I don’t constantly ask people: ‘Can I take your picture?’ because I’m fundamentally embarrassed to photograph strangers, to interrupt the sort of fluidity of the moment. I think the quality of my work comes from this high threshold of embarrassment. I have to have a level of suffering from not being able to take a picture, and the suffering gets so much I actually tell myself: no, I have to do this now.”

His return to music wasn’t quite so urgent. When Tillmans started making electronic tracks again in the mid-2010s – inspired in part by the sound of the US label Fade to Mind, home to Kelela, Kingdom and Dawn Richard among others – he elected to keep it to himself, occasionally playing it to friends. One of them happened to be Frank Ocean, who suggested he might sample one of Tillmans’ tracks at some point. Instead, he used Tillmans’ Device Control in its entirety as the opening and closing track of his 2016 album, Endless. Tillmans had no idea until the day the album was released. “So it became super public,” he says. “In the end, my shyness about it wasn’t really a problem. Nobody actually said: why is he doing music? It felt quite natural.”

There followed a string of EPs – the 2016/1986 EP revisited some of the music he had made in his teenage synthpop duo – and a debut album, Moon in Earthlight, which shared its title with a 2021 exhibition. Tillmans certainly isn’t the only visual artist to have taken to making music but he is, by some considerable distance, the visual artist whose music has attracted the most acclaim: as well as Frank Ocean’s co-sign, his tracks have been remixed by an impressive selection of dancefloor luminaries, including Honey Dijon, Roman Flügel, Total Freedom and Daniel Wang. Listening to Build from Here, you can see why Tillmans’ music has attracted attention: it is filled with beautifully sad melodies, intriguing electronic atmospheres, songs that sit somewhere between synthpop and club music. It’s also threaded with field recordings and found sounds that Tillmans calls “audio photography”.

“Photography has never been like a purpose in itself for me,” he says. “It’s a tool for me to describe the presence or the feel of an object or a life situation. I feel touched by it and then I want to make a picture in order to speak about it. I feel sometimes compelled by sounds, so I started in the 2010s to more actively record things, somehow seeing this sort of acoustic poetry in them. I observed that musicians always say: ‘Oh, let’s do another take’ – it’s very natural for them.” Photography, he says, is different. “Even things I set up in the studio, I couldn’t take the same photograph the next day; there are some ingredients that escape notable parameters. I guess that’s what the work in sound and music is, as much as with visual and pictures – to leave as much of an unadulterated, un-tampered original energy and on the other hand to technically frame things and be as conscious as possible and allow this play of control and chance.”

What Tillmans’ music doesn’t have is the arched-eyebrow irony that often attends visual artists dabbling in pop – Martin Creed shouting “fuck off” over a shambolic indie backing, or the smirking japery of David Shrigley’s “alt-rock/pop pantomime” Problem in Brighton. “Because I have so much respect for music and musicians, it would be ridiculous if I pushed for something wasn’t any good,” he says, “or that was just an ironic stance, or like a rehashing of my college daydreams, which is the other thing than happens when a visual artist has this rock star moment. I consider Blue Monday by New Order as one of the greatest artworks of the late 20th-century period, you know? It doesn’t have to be a piece of music or sound art, it’s just art.”

His recent exhibitions have integrated both. In 2014, he opened a music “playback room” in his Berlin gallery Between Bridges, inaugurating with an exhibition dedicated to pre-acid house sampling pioneers Colourbox: he repeated the idea in subsequent shows in Munich and at London’s Tate Modern. “The purpose of Between Bridges has always been to show art that was not fully represented, and about the value of art. Some artists got forgotten because they didn’t limit their editions and therefore their art didn’t become expensive, so it’s not valued as much. I found those Colourbox records were amazing works of art; not just the cover art, but what is in the grooves. And just because they cost £10, there is no space dedicated to them.”

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As for his own music, he isn’t sure what the future holds although what is striking about Build from Here is its note of optimism about the future: it’s everywhere from the beatless, delicate title track, to We Are Not Going Back’s Moroder-esque pulse, to the motorik new wave of French Lesson, which keeps repeating the phrase “supportons lendemain” – let’s endure tomorrow.

It is intriguing, given that the latter part of the career-spanning retrospective 2021 book Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader seemed so consumed by anger: at Brexit, the rise of Trump and the far-right AfD party in Germany, at attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. Oh no, he says: he remains “optimistic by nature, but not in a naive way. One has to be realistic; the adversities other generations have faced were at least as multiple and strong as what the world faces now; the struggles that previous generations went through to attain the civil liberties that we enjoy today. I don’t want to change places with them, so that’s why I remain fundamentally optimistic.”

It was the same attitude he took at the start of his career, when he was photographing German clubbers in the wake of acid house. “The early 90s, when you look back, they weren’t all peace and post-cold war. The Yugoslavian war was raging, economically there was a lot of straightening-out happening. So there was optimism, but a sober, sombre optimism. It wasn’t like ‘hooray’ – it was excited apprehension for the future.”

• Build From Here is released via Fragile on 26 April