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LP
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FRAGILE 015LP
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LP version. Wolfgang Tillmans' latest album, Build from Here, is driven by a desire to explore and to expose. It navigates joy and heartbreak amid ruin and rebuilding, embodying hopeful defiance in uncertain futures. The songs vary in style, from propulsive and catchy to contemplative, featuring lush instrumentals transitioning into danceable beats. Tillmans' voice, whether growling and confrontational or tender and stripped down, maintains its prominence throughout, serving as the album's core. Also featuring FRAGILE.
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CD
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FRAGILE 015CD
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Wolfgang Tillmans' latest album, Build from Here, is driven by a desire to explore and to expose. It navigates joy and heartbreak amid ruin and rebuilding, embodying hopeful defiance in uncertain futures. The songs vary in style, from propulsive and catchy to contemplative, featuring lush instrumentals transitioning into danceable beats. Tillmans' voice, whether growling and confrontational or tender and stripped down, maintains its prominence throughout, serving as the album's core. Also featuring FRAGILE.
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LP
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FRAGILE 012LP
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2023 repress; LP version. Moon in Earthlight describes the phenomenon one can see in the first few days after a new moon, when the slim crescent of the moon is completed into a full circle by a faint light that is not lit by sunlight but by the light reflected from Earth. It is also the apt title for the first album from an artist whose first love was astronomy. After six EPs over the course of five years, Wolfgang Tillmans now releases his first album, Moon in Earthlight, a singularly plural 53-minute piece comprised of 19 tracks. Opening with more that connects us than divides us, "Celloloop / More That Connects Us", a looped cello sets out a discursive path for a bright keyed melody to flirt with while the sounds of the organ and synthesizer build their supporting roles, all along a bouncing four-to-the-floor beat punctuated with bright electronic chimes and the rhythmic tempo of a shaker. Voices and laughter are overheard in the background of another field recording sounding water dripping from a "Rain Gutter" later caught by the soft, warm rhythmic bounce between two synth notes on "Fourth Floor" where chime-like and percussive timbres resonate from the metal tine keys of the kalimba creating a meditative acuity, which Tillmans peppers with arpeggiated synth riffs. A composition of multiplicities, Tillmans' album debut is a collage of sounds, field recordings, words, studio jam sessions and live recordings, voice, soundscapes, and instrumentation scored with audible space to breathe along the way. Keeping pace, the first "Kardio Loop" is a vocal calisthenics contemplating "the possibility of a happy life" and/or the propositional properties of its semantic constructions backed by the recording of a heartbeat from a cardiogram. This movement is gradually accompanied by a set of orchestral synth pads that build to a crescendo before the soft, twirling melody of "Stonerella" carries you along a carousel-like melodic, pop, instrumental timed in the percussive clapping of pebbles. You float through "Don't Kill It by Naming It" before dancing along "Insanely Alive" all the while contemplating the inherent, fragile complexities of language and being. Whether lyrically playful or introspective, Tillmans' voice is always giving: intimately unfolding as in the surprising take on Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa" or shapeshifting in "Can't Escape into Space" or fully naked as raw material expression in "Kantine" and "Ocean Walk".
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CD
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FRAGILE 012CD
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Moon in Earthlight describes the phenomenon one can see in the first few days after a new moon, when the slim crescent of the moon is completed into a full circle by a faint light that is not lit by sunlight but by the light reflected from Earth. It is also the apt title for the first album from an artist whose first love was astronomy. After six EPs over the course of five years, Wolfgang Tillmans now releases his first album, Moon in Earthlight, a singularly plural 53-minute piece comprised of 19 tracks. Opening with more that connects us than divides us, "Celloloop / More That Connects Us", a looped cello sets out a discursive path for a bright keyed melody to flirt with while the sounds of the organ and synthesizer build their supporting roles, all along a bouncing four-to-the-floor beat punctuated with bright electronic chimes and the rhythmic tempo of a shaker. Voices and laughter are overheard in the background of another field recording sounding water dripping from a "Rain Gutter" later caught by the soft, warm rhythmic bounce between two synth notes on "Fourth Floor" where chime-like and percussive timbres resonate from the metal tine keys of the kalimba creating a meditative acuity, which Tillmans peppers with arpeggiated synth riffs. A composition of multiplicities, Tillmans' album debut is a collage of sounds, field recordings, words, studio jam sessions and live recordings, voice, soundscapes, and instrumentation scored with audible space to breathe along the way. Keeping pace, the first "Kardio Loop" is a vocal calisthenics contemplating "the possibility of a happy life" and/or the propositional properties of its semantic constructions backed by the recording of a heartbeat from a cardiogram. This movement is gradually accompanied by a set of orchestral synth pads that build to a crescendo before the soft, twirling melody of "Stonerella" carries you along a carousel-like melodic, pop, instrumental timed in the percussive clapping of pebbles. You float through "Don't Kill It by Naming It" before dancing along "Insanely Alive" all the while contemplating the inherent, fragile complexities of language and being. Whether lyrically playful or introspective, Tillmans' voice is always giving: intimately unfolding as in the surprising take on Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa" or shapeshifting in "Can't Escape into Space" or fully naked as raw material expression in "Kantine" and "Ocean Walk".
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12"
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FRAGILE 009EP
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"Life Guarding" offers a first glance into an upcoming album by Wolfgang Tillmans. The song finds Tillmans in open waters, lyrically exploring wor(l)ds as they appear like undertows and tie in the listeners by his candid approach to accept whatever the drift throws at him and leaving him exposed at his most vulnerable. It seems no coincidence that the video Tillmans' shot and directed for the song finds a similar approach to "liquidity" in visual language. Shifting the lens between micro and macrocosms, collages of body parts, fruit and insects, we find him equally paying attention to the waves of the Atlantic Ocean as well as to the "same" water in the form of drops, evaporating on a hot kitchen plate. This current shape of "Life Guarding", in equal measures upbeat and melancholic, emerged in sessions with Tillmans' long term musical collaborators Tim Knapp and Jay Pluck in early 2019 at Trixx Studios in Berlin, that were further developed and produced by Tim Knapp and Bruno Breitzke. "Growing" was originally part of Wolfgang Tillmans' sound, light and video installation "South Tank" at Tate Modern in 2017. This summer finally sees the independent release of this collaboration with the L.A.-based duo Wreck and Reference. The song also features excerpts of Fred Weyrich's lyrics for German singer Alexandra's 1968 hit "Sehnsucht" (Longing). "Growing" involved the band placing samples of Tillmans' singing and spoken word over a kick drum-driven techno track made with synthesizers, acoustic drum recordings converted to digital drums, and noisy samples of jangling keys. Wreck and Reference are an experimental music project from California by Felix Skinner and Ignat Frege. Drawing upon the blown-out intensity of black metal and noise rock, they eschew traditional guitar-centric instrumentation to construct songs with digital samples, drums, and voice. To date, the band has released four EPs and four full-length albums, and has contributed to the production of the title track to Tillmans' 2018 EP Heute Will Ich Frei Sein.
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12"
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FRAGILE 007EP
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The sixteen-minute original version of "Source" is a vocal piece in which Wolfgang Tillmans explores his abilities to generate vocal sounds to tell a story while refraining from using actual words. Meshing six different sequences into one composition, each sequence investigates different moods and emotions meandering between the guttural, sacral, and absurd. The A-side's 10-minute remix by Roman Flügel develops changing arrangements around Tillmans' vocals. Contains a download code including bonus track: "Source (Roman Flügel 909 Mix)."
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CD/BOOK
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FRAGILE 005CD
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The CD publication is being released as part of the Wolfgang Tillmans's "There were 30 years between 1943 and 1973. 30 years from 1973 was the year 2003" exhibition, which is being held at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in fall 2017. Wolfgang Tillmans has devised a 35-minute sound installation as part of the exhibition. The installation takes the exhibition's inner-city context as its starting point, and operates in conjunction with numerous photographs (from a variety of Tillmans' s work phases) and video works to transform the space into a single cinematic whole. The Kunstverein in Hamburg is now releasing the 35-minute sound work Hamburg Süd / Nee IYaow Eow Eow as a CD, accompanied by a 48-page booklet that features exhibition views photographed and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Electronic manipulations of Tillmans's own voice, made to sound alternately choral, guttural, and absurd, are mixed with a kind of sung evocation of the four directions of the compass -- to which the exhibition hall is almost exactly aligned. To provide this counterpart voice, Tillmans invited the Hamburg-born and internationally renowned singer Billie Ray Martin. The alternating singing styles are embedded within long silent pauses, when visitors can hear noise from the two routes of traffic between which the Kunstverein is located: the cluster of platforms at Hamburg's central railway station, and Klosterwall, one of the city's main thoroughfares. Through the interplay of screeching railway lines, traffic noise, the reverberation of the immediate environment, word play, and voice explorations, Tillmans uses the sound work to react to aspects specific to the exhibition room at the Kunstverein in Hamburg: you can hear the city, but do not see it. In Further Listening, the second part of the CD, Tillmans presents further experimental solo pieces, collaborations, and two works that were previously released in 2016 (now available for the first time on CD): 2016 / 1986 EP (FRAGILE 001EP), Tillmans's first release, and Device Control EP (FRAGILE 003EP), which first came to public attention in 2016 when a full-length version of the song appeared as a guest contribution on Endless, a visual album by the US R&B musician Frank Ocean. 48-page exhibition booklet designed by Wolfgang Tillmans.
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12"
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FRAGILE 003EP
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"The mystery behind Frank Ocean's recently-released visual album, Endless, continues to unfurl with another piece of the puzzle revealed. In an Instagram post, Tillmans revealed that his track, 'Device Control,' was the closing song on Ocean's Endless" --Vice, August 22, 2016. This EP is the only physical release of photographer and musician Wolfgang Tillmans's "Device Control," following its digital release as part of Frank Ocean's Endless and the wave of coverage that ensued ("The photographer is on the hottest record of the year." --Artnet). The Device Control EP also includes three remixes of "Make It Up As You Go Along" from Tillmans's 2016 2016 / 1986 EP (FRAGILE 001EP) -- two by Daniel Wang & J.E.E.P. and one by Salem, ahead of the witch house trio's first album since 2010.
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12"
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FRAGILE 001EP
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Visual artist, Wolfgang Tillmans, consider his first passion in life to be music. The A-side features two pieces recorded in 2015/2016. The B-side features three songs recorded in 1986 with Bert Leßmann. "Make It Up As You Go Along" is a pulsing dance track based on the recordings of a book printing press in Stuttgart. "Triangle / Gong / What" is an experimentation made up of a special alloy triangle, a 999 fine gold gong and a vocal line. The 1986 recordings on the B-side were filtered and EQ'ed with the help of Tim and Klaus Knapp.
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