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And, on the other hand, one doesn’t really question the picture one has of a person. I personally read reviews of artists or musicians I do know and it’s so hard to get into reading about things I don’t know, so there’s something that reinforces what one already knows. You know, we all like to hold on to what we think we know. Wolfgang Tillmans: Wow, that is actually nice to hear. I thought I had an existing comprehensive knowledge of your work, but when I came to do some research ahead of our conversation, I began to realise how vast your career has been, how much work you’ve made, and how little I knew. Below, we talk with the Turner Prize-winning artist about Moon in Earthlight, the comforting harmony of celestial bodies, and his unique style of “audio photography“. Take a look in the gallery above for a glimpse of the album artwork and some of the work currently on display at Regen Projects. The release of the album coincides with two concurrent solo shows (at MUMOK in Vienna and Regen Projects in Los Angeles), both featuring Tillmans’ ‘Playback Room’ where visitors can experience the album in a specially-created environment, played with the highest sound quality.

Appropriately, it’s a genre-defying album, hypnotically composed of eclectic music and noise, harmonious yet occasionally discordant, with a cinematic quality that generates streams of images appearing unbidden across the silver screen of one’s consciousness. Moon in Earthlight is a compelling 53-minute long soundscape that ebbs and flows between moments of pure pop, ambient field recordings, spoken word, dancefloor-driven techno, studio-produced tracks, and moments of captured musical improvisation. After releasing five EPs over recent years and seeing one of his tracks feature on Frank Ocean’s 2016 album, Endless, the multidisciplinary artist has now released his debut album. Music has been a seminal and visible influence on Tillmans’ life and work over the past decades. Though “steering clear of absolutes” may be a vital component of his practice, he also tells Dazed: “The challenge is to not appear vague or evasive or willfully obscure… This state of deferring can't be a purpose in itself.” But even this interpretation is possibly too reductive, and fraught with the trap of possible complacency. It’s an agile and delicate dance between reaching resolutions and reserving the right to keep asking the question. While he manages to coalesce impactful meaning with the freedom and space of ‘cautiously deferring’ the decisive moment, Tillmans’ work is underpinned by a sense of purpose and deep thought. From his celebrated depictions of clubbing culture, and his table-top installations incorporating newspaper cuttings and printed ephemera, to the poignant and powerful pro-remain posters and t-shirts he designed and disseminated in the run-up to the referendum, Wolfgang Tillmans is beyond a polymath.

Yet it’s not without recurring concepts and qualities that make it distinctly Tillmanseqsue. The scope of Tillmans’ work is vast, encompassing a huge range of subjects and ideas as he moves between figuration and abstraction through a variety of mediums and forms of experimentation. Whether it be defying the supposed limitations of magazines to act as repositories of art, confounding critics by moving seamlessly between journalistic documentary photography and staged images, creating his own unique installation practice that draws our attention to the physicality of the photograph as an object, or bringing techno music into the venerated spaces of the art establishment, he cannot be categorised into a neat box. Wolfgang Tillmans is an artist who resists definition.