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

His student band was a catastrophe but the Turner prize-winning artist decided to release his music after Frank Ocean appropriated one of his experimental songs. So is his uplifting new album pop – or art?

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. 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.

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