On the first day of London Fashion Week, i-D partnered with Jaeger Le-Coultre to introduce the latest artist to join the watchmaker’s Made of Makers programme: Tokio Myers. Against a backdrop of a trickling waterfall, custom built for the watchmaker’s immersive pop-up at Battersea Power Station, Fashion Features Director Osman Ahmed invited Tokio onstage, where he wowed a live audience with a classical rendition on a grand piano. That was just the beginning. What followed was a conversation between the two, and a performance of Tokio’s symphony, a physical feat that left the audience speechless, as he navigated a gymnasium of technology and instruments that he designed himself to achieve his one-man-band style of music.
Then again, the London-born musician, who you may recognise as the winner of Britain’s Got Talent in 2017, is known for his artful blend of classic music and a distinctly modern sound, drawn from the worlds of pop, Hip- Hop and even cinema. As a musician, Tokio began playing the piano at age nine and spent much of his youth obsessed with classical music. In fact, it wasn’t until he turned 18 that he began discovering alternative genres. “Nine years of solid practice and learning the scales and arpeggios, missing out on the fun stuff that your friends are doing, like. going to football and all that kind of stuff,” he says of his childhood. “I would say those years were the definitive for me in learning the craft but when I got to 18, I started going out and just experiencing different aspects of life, and at that point, I was listening to electro music, I was listening to hip-hop. I didn’t grow up listening to those types of genres. I was late listening to those tunes, so they might have been out during the ’80s and ’90s, early 2000s.”
The late onset discovery led him to begin experimenting with different sounds, while his classical training equipped him to support the likes of Amy Winehouse, Kanye West and Sting onstage. “When I think of Mozart and Beethoven, I ask myself: ‘’What would they be making if they had this equipment? What would their symphonies sound like if they had access to all of this?’” he reflected. “It would have been completely different.” The tough part was teaching himself gaps in his musical knowledge. “I had to think a little bit outside the box and push myself because I’m a self-taught drummer and percussionist, and I just have to push myself in different areas that I never thought I’d be doing because, as a kid, I wanted to be a concert pianist,” he explained. “There has to be a point where you look at what you’ve achieved and where you’re but how can you push the envelope?”
As part of the Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Made of Makers, Tokio was invited to compose a new symphony inspired by the watchmaker’s iconic Reverso model, and its roots in the Art Deco movement. “I got a lot of visuals up on my screens in my studio because I was thinking of the Art Deco era,” he said of the process. “I researched the shapes, the lines and the textures used, and I had to figure out a way of transforming sound to reflect those shapes and colours that I was seeing. Everything starts, for me, at the piano. I mapped out the entire structure of the symphony, pretty much, quite roughly, and I can hear in my head where I want the violins, or the brass, or sound effects, or harp, or bass to go. And then, the gruelling work starts where I must start chiselling away and carving out the design of sound and stuff.”
Credits
Photography Dennis Eluyefa