Wolfgang Tillmans’ Frank Ocean Contributions Came Down To The Wire

Frank Ocean‘s Endless credits were readily available at the end of the visual album, and his Blond contributor list was published in the Boys Don’t Cry zine, but listeners are still trying to determine the extent of each contribution. One of the most obvious credits, though, was Wolfgang Tillmans‘ “Device Control,” which serves as the intro and outro to the visual album.

The German artist, who also took the portrait of Ocean that ended up on the Blond cover, shed some light on their partnership in a new interview with i-D. As with some of the Beyoncé, Lemonade and The Life Of Pablo postmortems, it illustrates how collaborators on these top secret albums are often nearly as in-the-dark as the public when it comes to the timing and content of the final product.

Tillmans’ initial reaction on Instagram touched on his surprise: “We were in touch about the intro, but I wouldn’t believe it until it happened…To my excited surprise this morning he didn’t just sample it. He released my complete original track as the end of this amazing album. So now it’s out – and in full length.”

He elaborated on this for i-D, saying, “Even though in the last four weeks I had some idea of what was going on, I was really also not having any reliable idea of timing and extent of my involvement in this release weekend extravaganza.”

The same thing happened with the cover. The image is from when Tillmans shot Ocean for Fantastic Man in 2015. The singer’s camp ultimately barred the magazine from running any of the photos, which frustrated Tillmans at the time. Eventually, they decided to use one for the still-unfinished album. And yet even with all this time perfecting the dual album rollout, Tillmans indicates the Blond cover decision came down to the wire.

“What is funny is that we are talking about a virtual cover, which is the format of a square because some, now ancient, medium for music was round and its packaging was square,” Tillmans explains. “I’m totally new to the art of the digital release and all this is fascinating, how the design was still in question hours before the actual release happened.”

Read the full interview here.