Richard Mille has announced its new partnership with musician Thomas Roussel.
An iconoclastic composer and musician, Roussel brings together an impressive background in classical music but with an abiding passion for electronic music.
“Roussel’s free thinking and creativity, like his ability to break away from the beaten path, could not but endear him to the Richard Mille brand, founded in 2001 with a determination to shatter the existing codes of Haute Horlogerie while promoting craftsmanship and extreme technicity,” according to a statement issued in Doha by Ali Bin Ali Holding.
“The uncompromising standards and inventiveness of Richard Mille watches echo the rigour and imagination required for composing orchestral music,” notes Roussel. “But beyond this, we share the same notion of communicating passion and emotion, and the same desire to carve out new creative pathways.”
Their respective defences of a “profoundly contemporary art form, unshackled and uncompromising, create a natural bond” between Roussel and Richard Mille. They have in common a passion for contemporary art and artistic professions whose ceaseless invention is always anchored in great precision. 
Roussel’s entry into the Richard Mille family is fully in keeping with the brand’s commitment to contemporary creation — from its acquisition of the Editions Cercle d’Art, founded with the support of Pablo Picasso, to its partnerships with Frieze, the leading contemporary art fair and with the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the statement notes.
Under the name Prequell, Roussel released a first and ambitious album recorded with the famed London Symphony Orchestra in 2017.
As a conductor, he is no stranger to spectacular events and in a single year, 2018, led a group of 80 musicians on the Seine river in front of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, followed by 40 musicians at the foot of the Forbidden City in Beijing.
To celebrate 15 years of Ed Banger Records, Pedro Winter entrusted him with arranging and orchestrating songs by the label’s iconic artistes, including Justice, Mr Oizo, Laurent Garnier and Breakbot.
Thomas Roussel wears the RM 67-01 Automatic Extra Flat, the statement notes.