aNTHONIE TONNON: LEAVE LOVE OUT OF THIS [2021]

ARTIST: 
Anthonie Tonnon

PUBLISHER:
Slow Time (NZ/EU)
Flippin Yeah (AUS)
Misra (US) 

FORMAT:
Vinyl/CD/Digital & Ltd edition 7” w/ spider

PHOTOGRAPHY:
Belinda Merrie & Kristy Pearson


Leave Love Out of This is the result of 5 years of carefully crafted writing and experimentation with new technologies. Instead of love songs and similar subject matter you would expect to find on a pop album, Tonnon pours the same amount of heft and emotion into spinning tales of resource consent, environmental and historical disasters, toxic workplaces and the still-felt effects of 1980’s Rogernomics. Guitars, piano and the more traditional band line up are set against sweeping synthesizers, samples, and drum machines.

Like the album itself, the visual direction of the album aims to similarly subvert expectations of what a pop album by a singer / songwriter should look like. A humanoid silhouette leaps through a desolate pastel-neon landscape that resembles a hazy memory of a scene out of a 1980’s video game. Expected pixels, grids and scan lines are traded in for ethereal grain and organic cloud patterns billowing in the background. For the accompanying portraits (dawn, noon, and dusk), Tonnon emerges from ground of this otherworldly diorama.

“I’m the first generation to grow up in the new economic system New Zealand adopted in the ’80s,” he says. “That system rests on hypothetically rational actors who act in their interest with good information. If you follow that logic, as economics departments do, you end up with a machine-like view of people. I think the idea for my generation was that by growing up without the distorted information from humanism or the welfare state, we would become perfect rational actors and thrive. That’s darkly comical now, given the intergenerational inequality we’re now dealing with. But it also feels to me like we can’t go back to that humanist world, because for my generation – we don’t really understand it. We’re a generation trained to be cold human calculators, but we struggle to do things differently even when we know the system isn’t working for us.”