Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) and Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978 - 2022) began working on music together in 2016, a creative relationship that developed out of a personal and professional one. Meeting in 2012, Echeverri became a trusted collaborator, assistant and friend to Tillmans.
The two spent a decade installing countless exhibitions around the world together before Echeverri’s death in 2022. Throughout this period a mutual love of music developed between the pair, which led, in 2015, to their first recording sessions together in New York, with Jay Pluck and Kyle Combs.
Out of these encounters they rented a studio in Porto, during the installation of Tillmans’s exhibition at the Serralves Museum in 2016, sessions which produced Warm Star.
Despite being something of an outlier among Tillmans’s other musical output, Warm Star remained much loved by its creators, although the original eight minute long version of the track was never released. A shorter version, the Porto/Bogotá Mix, was put out under the band name Fragile. The lyrics — part love song, part anxious exploration of the rise of right wing populism — would later form part of the text seen on Tillmans’s anti-Brexit posters in 2016.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the recording, and to pay tribute to his friend, the original mix of Warm Star is finally being released as a vinyl maxi single under Tillmans’s record label, Fragile. The single includes a remix by TR/ST, the project of Canadian musician Robert Alfons, whom Tillmans has long been an admirer of, and who has long been an admirer of the song. As Alfons notes, “My goal was to push the original song’s heartbreak even further."
Tracklist :
Side 1 :
A1 Warm Star (TR/ST Remix Extended), 2026
A2 Warm Star (TR/ST Remix), 2026
Side 2 :
AA1 Warm Star (Original Version), 2016
AA2 Warm Star (Porto / Bogotá Edit), 2016
This vinyl is available for pre-order
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Wolfgang Tillmans
Warm Star
