Anthonie Tonnon Is Restarting The Revolution In Whanganui
Anthonie Tonnon’s Synthesized Universe is restarting a revolution in Whanganui. The show is a live multimedia performance, built around the songs of one of the country’s most singular musicians. Its latest iteration, The Heavens, follows 2021’s A Synthesized Universe and expands the idea into a full audiovisual experience.
There is also an asteroid.
Tonnon’s interest in the Situationist International, a 1960s avant-garde art movement, inspired the form of the show. The Situationists saw cities as places to be experienced rather than simply traversed, and their ideas have become a framework for exploring Whanganui through sound, film and movement.
His latest show, Cinematographer, brings all of this together. Three years in the making, it tours New Zealand in October before heading to Melbourne and London. A new single, “Executive Assistant”, his first new music in three years, lands this month.
Intrigued? So was I. I sat down with him to trace the thread from a piano stool in Dunedin to the strangest show of his career.
It started with piano lessons. “My first memories of music were my mother, [she was] very keen on me learning piano. I’ve got a very early memory of me just banging keys and deciding that I was making a movie soundtrack. It was terrible.”
Songwriting took over soon after. “I discovered that I could write songs and I didn’t want to do anything else. I relentlessly pursued that.”
He did the touring anyway, including four trips through the United States. “[Dive bar gigs] didn’t feel quite like I’d found my thing.”
So he changed the format rather than the songs. “I’ve always called myself a songwriter and a performer. Songwriting is why I get up and do it. That’s the catalyst and the fuel. Anything can be the vessel [for the music], whether that’s making a better home for the music or doing something incredible with people with the music.”
That probably explains the trains, the planetarium, the elevator and now a French revolutionary art movement. The song comes first and the venue is negotiable.
Cinematographer is the biggest test of that idea yet. “Cinematographer is the culmination of everything I’ve learned, really. It’s an immersive show. It’s a story as well as a live music show. In this show, I am telling the story of the Situationist International, who were a revolutionary art group in the ’60s. Largely in Paris, famous because they were a big force behind the 1968 riots.”
The Situationists gave us the concept of the spectacle, Guy Debord’s argument that modern life had been reduced to something we watch rather than something we live. They were also film obsessed, and their two great methods translate almost directly to a stage. Détournement meant hijacking existing images and turning them against themselves. Psychogeography meant drifting through a city on foot to work out what it was really doing to you. Their slogans ended up on the walls of Paris in May 1968.
The show runs two timelines against each other. One is the Situationists and their experiments in 1968 France. The other is New Zealand at the turn of the millennium, the moment these islands became, as Debord would have it, a society of the spectacle. Tonnon links the two, and does it from a provincial city on the Whanganui River.
“Part film, part performance lecture with this kind of Francophile feel, and then part disco club set. Like going to a nightclub in 2004 and a revolutionary meeting in the ’60s at the same time. I’m your DJ, your singer, your documentarian, and your revolutionary guide.”
The staging is built to carry all four jobs at once. The guitar is gone, replaced by a vocoder and a pair of Synthstrom Deluges pressed into service as turntables. Erica Sklenars, who also worked on A Synthesized Universe, handles the visual DJing. Theo Taylor shot custom cinematography, which is cut against archival footage. Karlya Smith handles styling, while Daniel Alexander handles design. The music was developed with longtime producer Jonathan Pearce of The Beths, who has worked with Tonnon since Successor.
What makes Tonnon compelling is the collision. He blends genre and era without treating either as sacred, and the result is more than a gig. Cinematographer is an exercise in creative disruption, crashing historical oddities into neo-vintage electronic soundscapes and landing somewhere between nostalgia, intellectualism and the physicality of music. It promises to be one of the most distinctive theatrical and musical moments of the year.