Tyler, The Creator's 'Chromakopia' Listening Event: An Inside Look

As a born aesthete Tyler, the CreatorPeople always think in shapes and colors instead of hard numbers. He leaves that sort of thing to people like Alex Reardon, president of Silent House Studios, a creative director he’s worked with since Igor.

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On Sunday night (October 27), fans at LA’s Intuit Dome watched the pair’s synergy unfold for Tyler’s listening event for Chromacopyhis eighth studio album released this morning. With flashes of Kelly Green lights beaming down a cross-shaped stage and emerging from square boxes between the seats, it was at once trippy and understated – as much about functionality as aesthetics.

“We create a semi-static lighting and a painterly look, so that hearing is the sense most activated by the experience,” he explains. Billboardreferring to a lighting setup that avoids dramatic fluctuations. “You walk in, you see something that looks cool, you take a picture of it and it anchors the experience, but then it doesn’t start with huge color changes and scenic changes and costume changes and drama and pyros and all that. the things we would add to his performance, because there is no performance underlying it. And therefore it will be visually distracting and therefore detract from the audio or auditory feel.”

The set for the project, which began about six weeks ago, will be a regular part of his upcoming Chromakopia Tour with Lil Yachty and Paris Texas. It’s just the latest part of a 30-year career that has seen Reardon collaborate with everyone from Tyler to Tears for Fears and The Weeknd. Bringing all his creations together is a methodological philosophy that his architect father taught him years ago. “A designer has to be just as creative as an artist,” Reardon explains. “Except according to a specification.”

In a discussion with BillboardReardon talks about some of those specs, 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?

With each album cycle he creates a unique aesthetic to match. Now if we just look back Call me if you get lostWhen we were at this stage of that album cycle, we started the conversation about the tour and he said, “Okay, I want video screens, I want rises and I want this stuff.” And I said, “Let’s take a moment to think about that and look at the album as a whole on a slightly higher level. What does the album mean to you? What are the underlying motifs that you think are relevant and that do not concern the decor? Just talk to me about the album.” And he meant traveling, traveling all over the world, broadening your horizons, leaving where you come from, just looking at the world with wonder – but always in luxury.

Wherever he showed up at an event, he always had baggage with him. So I said, ‘Okay, if I’m hearing you right, this sounds like Slim Aarons photography. It sounds like a country house on the shores of Lake Como. It sounds like Riva Powerboats, that kind of atmosphere. And he said, “Yes, yes, yes, that’s it.” That made my job much easier – because for that tour we literally built him a mansion on the shores of Lake Como with a Riva motorboat that took him to a B stage. That made sense, because I asked him what the album was about, and not, “What do you want on your stage?”

So with this album we’ve had conversations about what is the central visual iconography that Tyler wants to associate with this album. So we’ve had those conversations and those are the conversations that led to the design direction that we’re taking. It’s so refreshing to be able to talk to an artist about the highest intention of the album, instead of, ‘I want lasers, I want pyro.”

What were some of the logistical challenges of putting this together?

There are three measures for a successful design in a live production: there are the aesthetics, the logistics and the finances. The aesthetics, which we’ve clearly talked about now, the logistics, is, ‘Does it fit in with the location? Will it fit in the trucks to get from A to B, from C to D, and will it stay within budget?” And I think because Silent House has been doing this for so long, we’re pretty good at making estimates of, “Okay, this is going to be about the right budget. This will fit.”

But what we do is that we have been doing this long enough. We know what questions to ask, and I think when it comes to a new location, our first questions were, ‘Okay, we need to go to A, go there, B, meet all the relevant internal technical people, and then figure C a design, a creative design that fits, taking into account what they tell us what we can and cannot do. I think it would have been completely the wrong thing to do by selling this concept, doing something great and going to the venue and realizing he couldn’t do it.

So I think we as designers really have to think about, “Where is this event happening? What can we do there (in)?” We then apply his input, we then apply our input, we mix it in a big kettle and then the idea comes that we then refine with his input. So, logistically, we have to work very closely with the production management team, with the location, with the suppliers, with everyone. And it creates a huge amount of work.

But because we’ve been working with all these people for decades, it becomes a kind of shorthand. There’s a lot involved. Does this element we design fit in the loading dock? Can we get it on a truck? How do we get it on the floor? How do we do this? We’ve had a lot of on-site meetings, a lot of meetings with very helpful people, and I just want to give a quick shoutout to Intuit in the middle of their first Clippers game. They have another gig coming up, and they’re still responding to emails. They’re still with us, they’re still great and collaborative, and I know they’re under the hammer right now.

What is it like working with Tyler?

He is such a phenomenally pleasant person. We all have notes from people who employ us. The artist has notes, and normally that’s met 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 awards ceremony and he shakes everyone’s hands and says hello to the cable pager and the guy who brought him coffee. He’s just extraordinary.

He is very good at storyboard sketches. Sometimes he will put loose ideas on a storyboard. “I think it should do this, then this, then this and this.” And then us working behind the scenes, the production team, the creative team, the video content, everyone, we shuffle away and come up with a bunch of different concepts. And he says, ‘I like that. I don’t like that. Let’s do some more of this and this looks cool. And then the process continues. But sometimes he is very specific, sometimes not. Sometimes he says: I think it should be something like this. There isn’t necessarily a real prescribed path. It’s just a sketch or a conversation or how he feels at that moment.

It’s cool that Tyler values two-way communication. Many artists simply have a lot of ‘yes men’ around them, and it shows. They brought out some of the most contrived things with their images.

There is something for many great artists where nothing is contrived as they literally open their souls to the people who listen, watch and absorb. And we as humans also instinctively respond positively to that honesty. Tyler is a man without tricks. I think that transcends the genre of music. I think it works with painting, poetry, music and any form of artistic expression. That true revelation of the soul is something that the people who absorb the music will empathize with and love. And I think he’s always had that being completely devoid of artifice. That is one of the many reasons why he is so successful.

I imagine you are a ‘form follows function’ type, as a designer. The lasers and explosions aren’t as important as the big idea.

No, and I think there are a lot of design agencies or designers who are in the business of designing live events and who have a technology background. So they tend to emphasize the new technology or look at this lighting installation. There are so many amounts of light in there, or they look at the physics of it. And that works for some acts. But I guess if you have an artist who doesn’t think that way, why force him to get excited about a certain technology? Technology should serve a higher purpose and that higher purpose should be what the artist’s purpose is in creating that album.

If you had to compare Tyler’s instinct for aesthetics to anyone in history, who would it be?

That’s a very good question that could take me a lifetime to answer. And I don’t want to sound funny. That’s not me at all, because my references to artists would be so different. It’s such a subjective answer that I don’t want to set the internet on fire with people saying, ‘Are you kidding me? How can you? This man?” But one of the things, and this is completely subjective and just my personal thing, is that because I grew up in Britain, I think Tyler, just to me, is kind of like the David Bowie of his generation.

Wow.

He is an artist of his generation. I don’t think comparisons to anyone else around are really relevant because they would be distracting and he wouldn’t. But when I explain why, from my own humble opinion, I think he has a David Bowie-esque character, it’s because as a musician he also exists with equal force in the visual medium as he does in the aural medium. He has the ability to reinvent himself without losing himself, which I think he and Bowie both have in common. I don’t think either of them really followed any particular zeitgeist. They just thought, I love this. And the whole world said, “Yes, I’m in.”

And I think as a result his career will last as long as David’s. I think there is absolutely no reason why that wouldn’t happen. I mean, he’ll remain his honest self as long as he chooses to do this. And I think whatever form of creativity he chooses, if he carries those qualities within him and will be extremely successful at it.

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