ANCESTRAL WAVES TO AQUEMINI: How I Found Gregory Hawkins and Brought the Shayne Larcher Orchestra to Life

In 2022, I hit a spiritual checkpoint when something cosmic clicked.

After years of dreaming, designing, and recording—after flipping through old records, scribbling character names in notebooks, doing photoshoots with my cousin of the various personas, and slowly building out a fictional world rooted in real diasporic memory—I knew I was finally ready to bring my eclectic team of musical personas to life in a format that I once needed when I was younger; being the superhero cartoon and anime fanatic I am. But I wasn’t looking for just any illustrator. These weren’t throwaway characters. They were avatars—extensions of self, mythic fragments of a Black sci-fi gospel I had been constructing since childhood; since each character was my identity after changing my artist name so many times. Thus, these weren’t even just characters—they were lineage, so the artist had to feel like family. I needed someone who could honour that gravity.

That’s when I found Gregory Hawkins and I knew without a doubt: this was the one. Immediately, I knew he was THE artist, whose style, legacy, and philosophy felt like fate

The Mixed Gemini From Two Worlds—And Both Were Made of Music

I’m the child of two different continents, two opposing rhythms that somehow harmonize.

On my mother’s side: we have European French, Irish, and Arabic roots, with several generations purely French-Canadian, raised in Québec. Her mother—my Mami—was a Bebop jazz singer who fronted her own band in the 1950s, holding down stages as a bold, golden-skinned woman in a country that didn’t always know what to make of her. My Mama grew up singing backup vocals in 1980s funk and R&B groups, passing that mic—and that fire—down to me.

On my father’s side: Caribbean Indigenous mixed with most of their family in St Lucia, rooted in rhythm, resistance, and ritual. His father—my grandfather—was a Tenor Saxophonist in a Big Band Jazz Ensemble in the 60s, and before that, he played classical music in quartets across St. Lucia, Trinidad, Curaçao, and Aruba.

That made me a bridge between Francophone and Anglophone worlds. I didn’t inherit this fusion by accident—I embody it.

Music, Family & First Contact with the Mothership

One of my cousins taught me the word “Wu-Tang” before I could even form full sentences; who was the same cousin whose Digital Underground CD introduced me to Hip Hop and his PlayStation made me fall in love with 3D-platformer games. The first rap album I ever owned was OutKast's Greatest Hits, handed down from my dad. But the record that rewired my soul was Parliament’s Mothership Connection.

That discovery came from an unexpected place: I was in sixth grade, watching Undercover Brother with my dad. There’s a scene where Eddie Griffin pulls up in a Cadillac blasting “Give Up the Funk.” It caused ripples in my life before I even knew it. I remember my dad got up, went to the furnace room of , and came out with two crates full of records, and pulled out the exact same vinyl. It was the first record he ever played for me. That was my first taste of Black mythology through music. The Mothership wasn’t just a funk fantasy—it was a birthright.

That moment didn’t just inspire me to make music. Over the years, it subconsciously gave me a mission.

Meeting Gregory Hawkins Wasn't a Business Move—It Was Bloodline Recognition

By 2022, I was deep into building my multimedia universe — the Shayne Larcher Orchestra (SLO) — a mixed-media project rooted in the sonic soul of my ancestors and the sci-fi futures they never got to see. Every character I created carried a piece of my story, from the streets of Québec and the beaches of the Caribbean to the wild expanse of outer space.

When I found Gregory Hawkins, something clicked. I wasn’t just looking at a dope illustrator—I was seeing my cultural reflection.

Greg wasn’t just designing art—he had already shaped Black music history. He painted the touring murals for Babyface & L.A. Reid. He made the original Freaknik t-shirts that turned ATL into an icon. He also illustrated OutKast’s Aquemini album cover—an eternal image burned into the back of my brain since I was a kid. That cover shaped how I saw Black artistry: regal, weird, powerful, interdimensional.

The wildest part was that Greg’s mentor was Overton Lloyd, the genius who brought George Clinton’s Funkadelic vision to life. That same Funkadelic record my dad pulled from the back room. That same mythology that called me to build SLO.

This wasn’t random—it was ancestral alignment.

Shayne Larcher Orchestra: My Life’s Work in Sonic Form

SLO is more than music. It’s more than a game, or a comic, or an anime waiting to happen. It’s my heirloom.

It reimagines my grandfather’s band—the Southern Lights Orchestra—as a futuristic time-traveling crew piloting a sound machine called the ChronoMech CM58. Each member represents a fragment of my identity:

• AUDACI – Autotune prophet, cyberpunk messiah, and heartbreaker of the void

• R0N1N – Neo-noir otaku samurai, protecting analog Black nerd culture

• BaBa NtchR – Spiritual sage, serving ancestral libations through rhythm

• TimeMaster – Cosmic griot preserving forgotten timelines

• SalvadorAudi – Jet-setting maestro of distance, presence, and global harmony

  
  

Each of them comes from me. Each of them represents a struggle I’ve survived and a sound I’ve made my own.

So when I needed someone to give them faces, clothes, power, presence—I knew it had to be someone with legacy in their hands.

Greg delivered exactly that. He didn’t just understand the vision—he had already lived it.

Music is My Blood, and SLO is My Offering

Let’s be real: Gregory Hawkins is the reason SLO has a visual soul. He believed in me before the world did. He painted my cosmic squad with the same reverence he once gave to OutKast, Babyface, and Parliament. He helped me transform sound into story—my story.

I carry two cultures, two languages, two histories. One foot in Québec, the other in Ontario, my head in the Caribbean clouds and ears tuned to the mythologically afrofuturistic waveforms of musical force. That makes SLO more than a project—it’s a cosmic reclamation. A mixtape of myth and memory. A beat passed down from saxophones in St. Lucia, bebop clubs in Québec, and bass-lines that called down the mothership.

Thanks to Gregory Hawkins, now the whole world gets to see what it’s always been meant to hear.