As a born aesthete, Tyler, The Creator’s always thought in shapes and colors rather than hard numbers. He leaves that stuff to folks like Silent House president Alex Reardon, a creative director he’s worked with since Igor.
On Sunday night (Oct. 27), fans in L.A.’s Intuit Dome saw the pair’s synergy unfold for Tyler’s listening event for Chromakopia, his eighth studio album that dropped this morning. With flashes of Kelly Green lights beaming down on a cross-like stage and emanating from square pockets between the seats, it was simultaneously trippy and restrained — as much about functionality as aesthetic.
“We are creating a semi-static lighting and scenic look so that the hearing is the sense that is most activated by the experience,” he explains to Billboard, referring to a lighting arrangement that avoids dramatic fluctuations. “You walk in, you see the thing that looks cool, you take a picture of it and it anchors the experience, but after that, it doesn’t start with massive color change and scenic changes and costume changes and drama and pyros and all the stuff that we would add to his performance because there is no performance underpinning that. And therefore to do that will be visually distracting and therefore detract from the audio or the auditory sense.”
The set for the project, which began about six weeks ago, is set to be a fixture of his upcoming Chromakopia Tour featuring Lil Yachty and Paris Texas. It’s just the latest entry into a 30-some-odd-year career that’s seen Reardon work alongside everyone from Tyler to Tears for Fears and The Weeknd. Threading all of his creations together is a methodological philosophy his architect father taught him years ago. “A designer has to be as creative as an artist,” Reardon explains. “Except to a specification.”
In a discussion with Billboard, Reardon talks about some of those specifications, his working relationship with Tyler and more.
How would you describe Tyler’s thought process when it comes to merging the aesthetics with the sound of his music?
Each album cycle, he creates a unique aesthetic that goes along with it. Now, if we just look back to Call Me If You Get Lost, when we were at this stage of that album cycle, we started the conversation about the tour and he was like, “Okay, I want video screens, I want rises and I want this sort of stuff.” And I said, “Let’s pause on that for a second and take a slightly higher level look at the album as a whole. What does the album mean to you? What are the underpinning motifs that you think are relevant and don’t think about the stage set? Just talk to me about the album.” And he was referring to travel, global travel, broadening your horizons, getting out of where you’re from, just looking at the world in wonder — but always in luxury.
Wherever he turned up at an event, he always had luggage with him. So I said, “Okay, if I’m hearing you correctly, this sounds like the photography of Slim Aarons. It sounds like a mansion on the banks of Lake Como. It sounds like Riva Powerboats, that kind of vibe. And he went, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s it.” That made my job much easier — because for that tour, we literally built him a mansion on the banks of Lake Como with a Riva powerboat that took him out to a B stage. It made sense, because I asked him what the album was about, not, “What do you want on your stage?”
So with this album, we’ve had those conversations about what’s the central visual iconography that Tyler wants to associate with this album. So we’ve had those conversations and those are the conversations that have spawned the design direction that we’re going in. It’s so refreshing to be able to talk to an artist about the highest level intent of the album rather than, “I want lasers, I want pyro.”
What were some of the logistical challenges that went into putting this whole thing together?
There are three metrics for a successful design in a live production: There’s the aesthetics, logistics and finance. The aesthetics, obviously we’ve been discussing now the logistics are, “Is it going to fit in the venue? Is it going to fit in the trucks to get from A to B, to C to D, and is it going to come in within budget?” And I think that because we Silent House have been doing this for so long, we’re quite good at gut check estimations about, “Okay, this is going to come in around the right amount of budget. This is going to fit in.”
But then what we do is we’ve also been doing this for long enough. We know which questions to ask, and I think if it’s with a new venue, our first questions were, “Okay, we’ve got to A, go down there, B, meet with all the relevant in-house tech people, and then C, come up with a design, a creative that will fit bearing in mind what they tell us we can and cannot do.” I think it would’ve been entirely the wrong way to go by selling this concept, doing this amazing thing, and getting to the venue and realizing he couldn’t do it.
So I think we as designers have to really work out, “Where is this event happening? What can we do [in] there?” We then apply his input, we then apply our input, we mix that up in a big cauldron and then comes the idea which we then refine with his input. So logistically, we have to work very closely with the production management team, with the venue, with the vendors, with everyone. And it creates a huge amount of work.
But because we have been working with all these people for decades, it becomes a kind of shorthand. There’s a hell of a lot that goes into this. Will this element that we are designing fit into the loading dock? Can we get it on a truck? How do we get it onto the floor? How do we do this? We’ve had a lot of meetings on site, a lot of meetings with very helpful people, and I want to give a little shout out to Intuit in the middle of their first Clippers game. They got another gig loading in, and they’re still responding to emails. They’re still engaging with us, they’re still being wonderful and collaborative, and I know they’re under the hammer at the moment.
What is it like to work with Tyler?
He is such a phenomenally pleasant human being. We’ve all got notes from people that employ us. The artist has got notes, and normally that’s received with a slightly sharp intake of breath and “Oh, here we go” — but with him, he’s like, “Cool.” I wonder what he’s going to say. We walk into an award show and he shakes everyone’s hand and says hello to the cable pager and the guy who brought him a coffee. He’s just extraordinary.
He’s very good at storyboard sketches. Sometimes, he’ll actually storyboard loose ideas. “I feel it should do this, then this, then this and like this.” And then we who work behind the curtain, the production team, creative team, video content, everyone, we shuffle off and spin up some different concepts. And he goes, “I like that. I don’t like that. Let’s do a bit more of this and this looks cool.” And then the process continues. But sometimes he’s very specific, sometimes he’s not. Sometimes, he’s like, I feel it should be kind of like this. There’s no real prescribed path per se. It’s just either a sketch or a conversation or however he feels in the moment.
It’s cool Tyler values two-way communication. A lot of artists just have a lot of “yes men” around them, and it shows. They put out some of the most contrived stuff with their visuals.
There is something [to] a lot of great artists where nothing is contrived when they literally open their soul to the people who are listening, watching, absorbing. And we, too, as humans instinctively respond positively to that honesty. Tyler is a man entirely without artifice. I think that that transcends genre of music. I think it works with painting, poetry, music, any form of artist expression. That genuine revelation of the soul is something that the people who are absorbing that music will empathize with and love. And I think that he has always had that being completely without artifice. That’s one of the many reasons he’s so successful.
I’d imagine you’re a “form follows function” kind of guy, being a designer. The lasers and explosions aren’t as important as the big idea.
No, and I think there are a lot of design firms or designers in live event production design that come from the technological background. So they tend to emphasize the new technology or look at this lighting rig. It’s got so many quantities of lights in it, or they look at the physics of it. And that works for some acts. But I think if you have an artist who doesn’t think that way, why force them into getting excited about some technology. Technology needs to serve a higher purpose and the higher purpose should be what the goal of the artist is in making that album.
If you had to compare Tyler’s instincts for aesthetics to anyone in history, who would it be?
That’s a really good question that I may take a lifetime to answer. And I don’t want to sound facetious. I’m not at all because my references to artists would be so different. It is such a subjective answer that I don’t want to set the internet a light with people saying, “Are you kidding? How can you? This guy?” But one of the things, and this is entirely subjective, and just my personal thing, is that obviously having grown up in the U.K., I think Tyler is, to me only, kind of a David Bowie of his generation.
Wow.
He’s an artist of his generation. I don’t think comparisons to anyone else that’s around are really relevant, because they would be derivative and he isn’t. But if I explain why I, from my own humble opinion, think that there’s a David Bowie-ishness to him, it’s because he exists as a musician also with equal amount of strength in visual medium as he does in the auditory medium. He has an ability to reinvent while not losing himself, which I think Bowie and he both have both share. I think neither of them really followed a particular zeitgeist. They just thought, this is what I think is great. And the whole world went, “Yep, I’m on board.”
And I think as a result, I think his career will be as long as David’s, I think there’s absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t. I mean, he will continue to be his honest self for as long as he chooses to do this. And I think whatever form of creativity he chooses to get into, if he will bring those attributes to and be wildly successful in.
