Friday, July 24, 2015

ACBA: Colourbox by Wolfgang Tillmans

















Colourbox
Music Of The Band (1982-1987)
London, UK: 4AD, 2014
Audio CD
Limited edition (Edition size unknown)

Compiled and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans, this CD accompanied an exhibition of the same name, at Between Bridges, Tillmans' Berlin non-profit gallery last year. The space was equipped with a high-end hi-fi sound system playing the same selection of 16 songs as the disk. The original master tapes and LPs (with artwork by Vaughan Oliver) were also on display, alongside a list of the original samples used by the band.

The cover art for the recording is from an unseen series of Tillmans' featuring the Canon Colour Laser Copier that he purchased with his Turner Prize winnings in 2000 (he was the first non-English artist to win the award). A decade later the machine was beyond repair so the photographer dismantled it as a 'deconstruction'.

"Brothers Martyn and Steven Young together with Ian Robbins, Lorita Grahame and Debian Curry were pioneers of experimental pop music. They created an eclectic sound drawing from reggae and soul influences, beat-box driven hip-hop rhythms, blue-eyed soul, as well as a fusion of far-ranging influences spanning from classic R&B, to dub and industrial. Using montages of analogue magnetic tape pieces and experimenting with tape machines, Colourbox were at the fore-front of sampling, which in it's digital form would become ubiquitous in the course of the 1980's. The band worked in a seeming contrast of pure artistic research in the studio and an anti-intellectual stance towards the outside world."
- Wolfgang Tillmans



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