Wolfgang Tillmans - Hamburg Sud / Nee IYaow eow eow (2017)

Eminent photographer turned sound artist and collaborator with Powell, Wolfgang Tillmans offers the soundtrack – a suite of scatty vocal duets with Bille Ray Martin and the Hamburg soundfield – relating to his current exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg

“Hamburg Süd / Nee IYaow eow eow is 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.

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 set, Tillmans presents further experimental solo pieces, collaborations, and two works that were previously released in 2016 (now available for the first time on digital format): 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.”