ANTHONIE TONNON: Planetariums, Trains & Music
An interview by Bridget Herlihy.
Whanganui based musician Anthonie Tonnon has become renowned not only for his song writing talents and the ability to create captivating synthesised soundscapes, but also for his passion for New Zealand history, in particular the history of our railways and public transport. Tonnon has masterfully interwoven these two seemingly separate entities, resulting in uniquely immersive performances on his acclaimed annual Rail Land tours. I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Tonnon to chat about his evolution as a solo musician, trains, planetariums and plans for the future.
Note: When Anthonie Tonnon announced his new show, a one-off performance at Whanganui’s historic Royal Opera House, the country was at Alert Level One, and live performances were recommencing after several months of physical distancing and heavy restrictions upon social gatherings. As much of the country finds itself back at Level Two, and Auckland endures another several days at Level Three, Tonnon is rolling with the proverbial punches. To ensure that physical distancing is maintained, and audience size complies with the Ministry of Health guidelines, he is now undertaking the epic task of performing three back-to-back shows on Saturday evening, one of which will can be experienced virtually from anywhere in the world.
You appear to have had a fascinating career trajectory to date, particularly in terms of the way in which you have created a hybridised form of historical storytelling accompanied by synthesised soundscapes. So lets start from the beginning. What is your life story?
I grew up in Dunedin. I love the place and feel very passionate about it. I studied history at university and I’ve always been quite an academic person, but for some reason just always wanted to do music. I did music while I was at university, and also did history as well. And I started playing in bands. I tried to live in Dunedin after university; I tried to make a go of it but it turned out to be quite hard to have an arts career in Dunedin at that time, especially in music. And at that time the promises of the internet weren’t really working.
So you left Dunedin in order to pursue a full-time arts career?
At a certain point I moved to Auckland, but I told my friends I was moving to Wellington as that is the only place you are allowed to move to from Dunedin. If you move to Auckland you just don’t tell anybody – you leave. So that’s what I did. I hung around the art galleries on K Road for a few years, made friends with people that went to Ilam. Along the way I wrote for the student magazine in Dunedin, and I guess when I moved to Auckland and I was just scraping by to get money, but not get to much of a ‘real’ job, so journalism was one of the skills I had. And so I did end up writing for Real Groove magazine, and a bunch of publications. I did a lot of music journalism and I did some radio pieces for RNZ.
Aside from writing about other people’s music, were you continuing to write your own music and perform while you were living in the big smoke?
I had a band, but it was pretty much my solo project. But we had band members and changed personnel a couple of times. We released a couple of EPs and a full-length album, toured with Beirut, and got pretty entrenched in the K Road, Wine Cellar, Whammy! Bar scene. We played the Kings Arms and venues like that, and got pretty good at touring the country, and had good crowds in places like Christchurch and Wellington. It got to the point where I could do a pretty good tour in New Zealand, and then started touring in America, doing tour exchanges with people from Seattle. People from the Pacific Northwest often have a real affinity for New Zealand; they often want to come here, and so I got to know people [there] and I did a 30 date tour in America, and then booked a 20 date tour of NZ, which I thought was pretty good. And through that I got an American label and started releasing in America.
How did you find the experience of touring in America? What kind of impact did this have on the evolution of your sound and processes, and the nature of your performances?
I put a lot of energy into touring in America. I’ve toured there three or four times. Mostly we would go extensively through the West Coast and then through the Mid-West, and then we would do some of the East Coast, but would manly focus on Chicago and New York. I put a lot of energy into America, and I made some good friends, and a few fans over there, and I met my record label over there; they’re based in Pittsburgh. And most importantly I learnt how to perform. Often I was performing pretty small shows; I was playing to wine cellars of every small city in America, and when you are playing to an unfamiliar audience every night, and I was touring solo, I had to learn how to make that a great experience. I feel like I came back after a couple of US tours really knowing how to perform. I started thinking quite differently about what I do, and I had been really focusing on an indie music thing; I was always following the indie music format, which was to keep playing shows and keep releasing music, and hopefully you find a magical label who makes everything happen and makes you famous. And it’s a winner-takes-all market; you either do extremely well, or you keep struggling.
When I released ‘Two Free Hands’ I had been on a musical journey with the way things sounded, kind of an electronic nature; an organic mixture of synthesised sounds and drum machines and things like that. But I also changed my practise a bit, so I really focused on honing back into New Zealand and Australia a little bit; I built a website, I started selling my own tickets, and I started performing in places other than bars. I found I was able to reach a new group of people by playing places like art galleries, and different kinds of spaces. I released the ‘Two Free Hands’ EP which went really well, and I got invited to work in a planetarium in Dunedin, so I developed this show Synthesised Universe because I had already been working in unusual kinds of spaces, arts world spaces. Synthesised Universe helped me create a more immersive show; it’s tightly timed as it’s timed shorter. There aren’t three bands in a bar, and the connection with drinking is severed a little bit; it’s more about the show. There was a great reaction to it, and I feel like I reached a lot of people who might not go and see me at the indie music venues of the world.
How did the idea for the Rail Land tour come about? Where did your fascination with the history of New Zealand railways and public transport originate?
I became quite interested in public transport, particularly rail, which kind of came out of nowhere when we needed to make a music video for the song ‘Old Images’. We had the opportunity to do it in Dunedin, but we didn’t really know what we wanted to make it about. I remembered these remnants of railway stations around Dunedin, and wanted to find out more about them. What I discovered was that Dunedin had a fully functioning suburban train network until 1982, but I had never known growing up in the ‘90s that trains were an option. I grew up in a completely different world of diesel buses and low expectations. I’d always believed what I had been told, that NZ was too small to have railway systems, but what I learnt was that we had them; we had great public transport systems all around the country and they disappeared only a generation before I was around. This was a really unsettling realisation; it was like a massive lie that I had uncovered. So I became very interested in it, and this was all swirling around in my mind after the video had come out, and the experience of having done Synthesised Universe led me to go “what about this conceptual show where we take trains to a venue”, not just to celebrate the trains that still exist, and the incredible survivors of our railway network – its incredible that there is still a train from Masterton to Wellington – but to also to prove to people that it is possible to have trains. We challenged the idea that it can’t be done by saying “lets just charter a train”.
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I started to realise the huge power that you have as a performer; if you are able to get a bunch of people to come to your show its incredibly powerful. You can’t get 150 people to listen to your song if you post it on Facebook. Attention is so hard to get now; its hard to get anyone’s attention for five seconds, so the fact that you can convince even 30 people to watch you for an hour and a half is incredibly powerful. The fact that you can physically get someone to travel somewhere and sit in a room with you and they give you their attention, I think that is a huge asset that we need to value highly. If you have developed that audience over time you can do amazing things with that audience. I realised that if I could get 150 people to a show in Dunedin, if I asked them all to pay a little bit each we could bring back a train to Dunedin, even if just for one night. And so for the last two years we chartered a train from Dunedin station to Waitati, and it was this great thing where you would get on the train to go to the gig. It is the power of getting an audience together to make something exist that didn’t previously exist, or which you are told can’t exist. What I have realised with Rail Land and the power of using your audience to do something practical – rather than sloganeering or old-style activism – I like to do things that are practical and mind-set changing. And I have started to see a pathway for myself where I can keep being a musician, not having to give up music and try to retrain as a lawyer or a public transport advocate, but to find something to focus on what I am good at, which is music and performance.
You have released several stand-alone singles, the latest being the somewhat haunting ‘Mataura Paper Mill’ about the old mill on the banks of the Mataura River in Southland. Do you have any plans to release another EP or album in the near future?
I now have this interesting practice; I still have an album cycle – I’ve got an album that I will release soon. It has been a bit more delayed than what I expected it to be, but in the extra time that its taken to finish the album I have realised that my practice – both from an artistic satisfaction point of view and also from a financial stability point of view – is more about these experiential, immersive kinds of shows. I’m redeveloping Synthesised Universe and I’m looking to take that on a world tour when I can. And I’ve got Rail Land as my yearly tour – I always try to do that in December – so I’ve got these two shows that are kind of a pillar of what I do. It is almost like the album cycle has become incidental around that. The model used to be to release an album every couple of years and hope that you get famous! But in that model you get so little income from each person that engages with the music, you either have to get so many fans that the tiny amount of money you get from each fan becomes a career, or you have to have another job. I found a practice where I can make this my main job, with a much deeper engagement with the people I perform to with these immersive kinds of shows that I guess have a little more value put into them.
Rather than releasing an album every couple of years, I have been releasing singles, and making extended players, and that has been a process that has worked really well. I do want to release another album soon, but I’m also accepting that the album is maybe not my main job anymore. It’s the thing I still feel very strongly about, having grown up listening to albums, and I love doing them. But the album in some ways is something that…people are more likely to go to one of my shows first and if they get really into the whole world of it, then they might listen to the album. But most people will only engage with the album on a superficial level; they might hear one single or something like that.
I have noticed in recent years several reasonably prominent bands, such as the once somewhat relevant Muse, proclaiming that ‘the album is over’, and instead choosing to release five or six singles prior to dropping an album in its entirety.
People have been saying that the album has been dying for so long. And it’s never been true, and people always say it too early. I don’t think the album is over; I still love an album. But I do think the forces are ganging up on the album; I think the way that streaming works now you are almost encouraged not to listen to an album – you are encouraged to listen to a play list. But I think it still has a value because as a writer you want to write a novel, or you want to write a collection of poetry. You don’t want to just write and release single poems or short stories one at a time all of the time. If you are a musician like me, the album is a major and important body of work which says something. But practically, in terms of your cycle, its not as financially useful as it used to be.
What impact did the period of lockdown have upon on your creative processes?
I found it pretty good actually. I had already worked pretty hard to get an at home process established. I think the real crisis in my sector of the arts was for the venues, and I felt for them because they have a place of trade and they are open every day, and that’s the only way that they earn their income. For musicians, we had our recession when everyone else was doing fine. When everyone else is doing great and talking about how the economy was going good, musicians were just banging our heads against a brick wall trying to figure out how to survive. But what that has meant over time is that musicians no longer rent a studio space is the central city; they no longer have people to pay on their team. We are such independent units; we do all of the jobs ourselves and often we work from our own homes. So when lockdown came along it was kind of business as usual.
The exception is that as musicians, we earn all of our income in one-off, really intense but quite short tours, and so if you got it wrong in this cycle, that was when you were worst hit. I really felt for friends of mine who were just about to go on a big tour and had to cancel it. That would be horrible. In terms of the day-to-day, I was lucky because I had just done Rail Land, so for me the timing was okay. I had just done a bunch of work over summer, and wasn’t planning to do heaps. I wasn’t about to go on a 30-date tour. I’m planning a massive tour in November, and I’m just hopeful that we won’t go back into the same situation.
It was really hard to learn how to work at home. It took me years. I have developed a process over a number of years with my writing where I start the day and I have to do a couple of hours of song writing, and I do it for no reason. I don’t know what I am writing or what it is for, but that is how I start my day. I even have a rule that I’m not allowed to have a coffee until I have done a bit of song writing.
That is very disciplined of you!
Its not discipline – I call it ‘cultivated enthusiasm’. I don’t really believe in discipline, because I think flagellation is not a recipe for creativity. For me, it is much more like you put seeds in the ground and you tend them and you watch them, and its just doing little bits each day. But you have to cultivate an enthusiasm for gardening – I actually hate gardening – but I like running, and I know that if I stopped running, if I didn’t run the few times I do a week, I wouldn’t like running anymore. And it’s the same with music and making art. There are so many facets to what I do, whether it’s planning or the tours, or individual shows like the one I’m doing now, and I find time to do that. But I found in lockdown that I was able to keep working completely as normal, and it was very gratifying to see the value of the structure that I had put in place, and it had paid off in that situation.
Your forthcoming show at the Whanganui Opera House, which is also a celebration of the release of ‘Mataura Paper Mill’, isn’t just a show for those who are able to purchase tickets to physically attend, but also for virtual audiences who can buy a ticket to watch the performance online as well?
Yes. It has been really satisfying to see how well people have responded to that. I have great faith in my audience that if you present something as having value and invite people to see value in it and pay for it they will. And this has done me well when it has come to recorded music releases. I will put a single on Spotify, but I will make an extended player with extra material and put it up on Bandcamp and people buy it. In putting out this show we have so far grossed about half as much for virtual tickets as the physical tickets that we have sold so far. And the virtual tickets are ‘pay what you can’, so the minimum is a $1 booking fee, but people pay for it. But if I had started from a standpoint of ‘I’m doing this physical show, buy a ticket. But I will stream it on the world’s largest social media network for free, I wouldn’t have sold any virtual tickets. And what we are trying to do has a real value, and a real cost as well. So all you really have to do is present something as having value and people will see it that way. And that’s why I think it is important to sell tickets. And people like buying tickets; even better if they can choose their price.
During lockdown I did lots of research into live streaming, and I learnt lots of things about it, but I didn’t feel comfortable that that was my model – to live stream over the internet. But I did think about going into a beautiful venue like the Opera House and doing a 100 person socially-distanced show that celebrated the building but also had a live audience element in it. And then Level One came along to my surprise, and we thought lets just see if we can fill it out. This live streaming thing is actually really exciting, but what it needs is a workable model. I’ve seen some really good examples of people not just doing shows – not just playing a gig and playing their songs on a live stream – like my friends in The Beths doing more of like a television show, I guess. And I’ve always tried to think like that: what’s a great hours worth of entertainment, rather than just band one, band two and band three. So getting Rose Lu, who is a writer I have always wanted to involve in something since I read her book last year, and getting my friend Al who runs this cool podcast, we have been trying to make it a little bit like a variety show, and kind of blending one thing into another, with a little bit of a fluid boundary between the segments. That makes it an hour’s worth of entertainment rather than act number one, act number two and act number three, and its been going well.
So will there be another Rail Land Tour in 2020?
Yes. So through Arts on Tour we will be doing another Rail Land in November in small towns all over the country. One of the great things about Rail Land is that it is a yearly show; I rewrite it every year. It’s always a mixture of different songs of mine, old and new, that people will know. What I have tended to do over the last couple of tours is play stuff that I haven’t played in years, and I kind of have an excuse to because its December, its nearly Christmas, everyone is kind of exhausted and nostalgic. So I always figure out a new set of songs to play, and if I have been working on new songs that I haven’t released yet but I want to play, I will play those there as well. And then I will work up these new strange and unusual Rail Land shows and songs that are kind of synthesizer beats and stories.
What I did with Rail Land was create music that was custom made for the show. I used to be much more of an analogue musician with a guitar and a piano. But over the last few years I have developed this process with a sequencer/sampler instrument called a Deluge, so I can make these synthesizer soundscapes with the equipment I have. I have discovered this voice that is not singing and not banter between songs either. It’s playing music and talking over the top of it. Its become a feature of Rail Land where I will play a regular song, and then I will play this weird synthesizer intro which will turn into a New Zealand railway story.
This year I have created a kind of hybrid of the first two years of Rail Land; so it’s a honed, best-of tour, so I will be bringing the best songs of Rail Land into one show, because I think it will be a good introduction to people who are coming into Rail Land for the first time and don’t know me. And I am also planning on going back to the main centres and bringing something new to the people who have gone the last two years.
Anthonie Tonnon will be performing three shows at the Royal Opera House in Whanganui this Saturday August 29th at 5pm, 8pm and 9:50pm. For further information and to purchase tickets to the physical and virtual shows please go to Anthonietonnon.com/tickets.
Image Credits: Feature Photo courtesy of Belinda Merrie. Live Photo courtesy of Karlya Smith.
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