Face The Strange

SOHN is the most recent mask adopted by pianist and singer Christopher Taylor, active throughout the noughties as Trouble Over Tokyo. In early 2012, with three well-respected albums under his belt and a fast-developing career as a producer, Taylor decided to dissolve Trouble Over Tokyo. By November that year, he’d re-emerged with a new synth pop EP and a new name.

“I think I found myself in a dead end,” Taylor suggests. “I found that it’s happened a few times in my life where I’ve been so focused on the path and then suddenly the path hits a dead end and it’s like, right, there’s no point trying to find a way around this, I might as well start again. It’s just the way my brain works.”

Since he was a kid, Taylor has been prone to dramatic reinvention, changing his name, changing his style, trying to force some kind of growth. Now 34, he is looking for clarity. “I felt like I was quite a hyperactive, hyper-emotional person and that wasn’t the person I wanted to be. I wanted to slow myself down.” As an artist, he wanted to sing less, write less and use fewer sonic layers than he had previously, “a conscious decision to reprogram my own brain, to make my points more clearly and not fill the world with more pointless words and waffle.”

The first SOHN EP, The Wheel, was released by London’s Aesop label, representing a kind of homecoming for the South London-bred artist. Taylor moved to Vienna five years ago because he was uninspired and disillusioned with his lack of progress in the UK. This year, his album, Tremors, came out on the premier UK indie label 4AD to broadly favourable reviews. With buzz building from his exceptional SXSW performances and sold-out shows around the world, Taylor has already blitzed his previous achievements, adding production work for Lana Del Rey and Banks to his list of credits.

Taylor is nonetheless loathe to go through another personality change. “I don’t know how it would work if it happened again. I’ve entered this much bigger world as an artist and this much bigger commitment in terms of being this version of me. All I can hope is the same thing I’ve been hoping since I was born, which is that this is the last one. Every time I make a change, I hope it’s the last one.”

For now, however, Taylor is still on the move. He plans to relocate from Austria to Los Angeles shortly, where he’s thinking about sharing a house with Danish firebrand MØ. “In the last year, I’ve been touring so much that I haven’t had a home, really. Obviously, it’s as good a time as any. I’m massively concerned about (LA) but I’m still going to move… Certainly in terms of producing other people, it’s a good place to be because it’s the epicentre of entertainment. On a personal level, I find it interesting and scary and that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t feel like I fit in there and I’m interested to explore that.”