Wolfgang Tillmans Is Dropping a New EP This Friday

The Turner Prize-winning artist is releasing his second five-track EP, as well as a music video filmed and directed by Tillmans himself.

Still from Wolfgang Tillmans' visual album for the That’s Desire / Here We Are EP.

The photographer, activist, and loudly anti-Brexit artist returns with his newest passion project—electronic music. Dropping on Friday on the label Fragile, the five-track EP titled Heute Will Ich Frei Sein (Today I want to be free) opens with an eponymous song that the Turner Prize winner recorded in Los Angeles with the Wreck & Reference, an experimental noise duo from California. It’s a catchy dance song that features Tillmans singing in a robotic-sounding German: “Today I want to be free. Feel my body. Without fear and implosion. Acceptance.”

The EP has a decidedly eighties sensibility to it, which makes sense considering the artist took a 26-year hiatus from making music in late ’80s, before picking up again where he had left off. Fast Lane is one such track, which was originally written and recorded in 1986 before being revisited in 2016. “I live in the fast lane but I have no fear,” sings an 18-year-old Tillmans over the updated song, an energetic remix by Bryan Metter and underground remix king Justin Strauss. (The album also has the original earlier version of Fast Lane.)

If art is what you’re looking for, there is Tired Car Alarm, which is a field recording that Tillmans made of a dying car alarm (it’s quite funny), which is to be enjoyed as a ready-made or a DJ tool, according to the album’s official press release.

The album, which features a minimal and melancholic cover designed by the artist himself, is set to be released in all formats (digital/12-inch/stream) tomorrow, February 2. Tillmans will also launch a music video that he filmed and directed for all five tracks on his YouTube channel.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ EP Heute Will Ich Frei Sein Releases Friday, February 2, 2018.


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