On August 1, Frank Ocean’s website added a mysterious, Apple Music-hosted video live stream. In the background at one point was a large boombox—part of an installation by acclaimed artist Tom Sachs. In the wee hours of August 19, Ocean released his new visual album Endless, and the credits gave “special thanks” to Sachs, among others. On August 20, Ocean released his new album Blond, called Blonde on Apple Music. At the same time, Ocean also released his Boys Don’t Cry magazine, which again features Sachs among its contributors. Today, Pitchfork chatted with Sachs over the phone about Endless. Update 8/22 (12:12 p.m. Eastern): Sachs also discussed his role in Boys Don’t Cry after seeing the finished product. “This is the print version of my 2011 film Color,” Sachs wrote today in an email about his contribution to the magazine. “Frank and I are both very interested in cars and of course in color. Color affects the visual perception of form. Color is taste and it is bias. If you dig just below the surface, you can't talk about Porsche without talking about how the color of someone’s skin affects the spectrum of access they have.”

Pitchfork: How did you get to know Frank?

Tom Sachs: He called me on the phone and we started a dialog about a lot of things that we’re both interested in. We’ve just been talking about different things. So we started on the phone and then we met in person in New York and in L.A. a few times. And we’ve dicked around with a few things in the studio. In my studio, and I worked a little on the zine, which I haven’t seen yet. I went to go buy it, but I guess it’s not for sale. I went to the place and they said that they gave away 1,500 copies yesterday.

What else can you tell me?

I know there was a huge wait on this for all this to come out. I think it's testament to the reality that things made by hand take time. We’re living in an age of non-handmade things. The iPhone is the best-made thing there is, but there’s no evidence of a human being involved with it. Frank's music, which is very personal and literally has his voice, in the same way that all musicians have their voice, it simply takes time. And when you see the video, you see him building a stairway to heaven in real time. The 40-minute version is edited, but there's something like a 140-hour version. That’s the whole thing. That exists, that’s the art piece.

The thing that we’re all seeing is the short, is the edited version. This version where there are three of them is kind of a compressed experience, where you see three Frank Oceans making the same thing. It’s not unlike the song on Blond called “Skyline To.” You hear what sound like a couple of Frank Oceans singing over each other. I think that’s his voice—I know a bunch of other people sing on it—but you hear him unapologetically laying two vocal tracks over each other, the chorus and the refrain. And they overlap in the same way you've got a couple of Frank Oceans building the staircase and a couple of times in the video they cross through each other, impossibly, without colliding.