Tron Lennon at Transmediale 08
Tron Lennon represents the collaborative work of Paul Bell and John Ferguson. We are both third year AHRC funded practiceled PhD candidates in Music, based at Culture Lab, Newcastle University UK. Exploring beyond a paradigm where musicians perform pre–composed works, we celebrate spontaneity and the ephemeral nature of sound. As a guitarist and DJ we have spent four years extending our practice through free improvisation and live audio–visual experimentation. In exploring indeterminate and dysfunctional systems alongside more direct causal gestures, we embrace unpredictability as a strategy to probe, provoke and generate creative response.
In Tron Lennon music emerges from three–way interaction; from the spontaneous communication between John and Paul, their individual interactions with the singularities of their instruments, and the seemingly autonomous nature of their chosen materials. The specificity of their individual aesthetics causes contradiction within their collaborative practice, often leading to antagonistic modes of engagement. This is laid bare in every performance where dialogue can appear both cohesive and broken. Through improvisation and real–time music making, Tron Lennon therefore seek to uncover hidden and unintended potentials in seemingly fixed media, exposing instability, contradiction and new roles for the live musician.
Tron Lennon were short listed for an award at Transmediale 08 and recently completed a short European tour culminating with a performance at this event. The tour was supported by CETL and we played three dates in the UK (Newcastle, York and Norwich), and three on the continent (one in Holland and two in Germany). We documented every performance on the tour (with multiple video cameras where possible) and professionally produced six DVDs which will serve as PhD documentation and promotional material. This material will be made publicly available on the Internet in the near future at http://www.tronlennon.co.uk .
Newcastle 17th Jan 2008
The Newcastle concert at Flipside (promoted by Canopy New Music) served as a warm–up and a chance to test all of the equipment, which proved useful as some problems with the video documentation emerged. We hosted the night and following our opening performance other improvisers were invited to perform in an open session format. Side Cafe provided an intimate ambience, the playing experience felt good and a capacity audience helped make this a successful night.
York 21st Jan 2008
Liaising with Will Edmondes, this concert followed up on an earlier CETL funded project (a free improvisation workshop led by John Edwards and Mark Sanders) and featured mesmerizing performances from some local practitioners including Karl DSilva, Gwilly Edmondez and Matt Postle. For Tron Lennon this was our first taste of being on the road, and although the rigors of travel were not yet taking their toll on us, equipment was suffering already, with the electronics in John’s guitar malfunctioning just before their performance. This contributed to a rather tense’ set, perhaps lacking in dialogue somewhat but relatively cohesive nonetheless. John found a new strategy for performing with light sensors, activating the circuit by gripping a torch between his teeth keeping both hands free to do other things. The evening maintained a workshop like atmosphere throughout and we were made to feel very much at home amongst this inquisitive audience.
Norwich 22nd January 2008
Having left York at 8.30 am we arrived in Norwich early afternoon and managed to get John’s guitar successfully repaired. The ‘Queen Charlotte’ advertises live ‘music’ seven nights a week, on arrival we were impressed by the scale and layout of the venue and with a helpful engineer soundcheck ran glitch free. Although planned as an evening of ‘live electronic experimentation’, unknown to us the architecture of this event had changed beyond all recognition, resulting in us headlining a night of singer songwriters. Taking the stage at 11pm, following three hours of acoustic guitar based repertoire was an uncomfortable situation. The mood in the room fed directly into our music, a drone based set ensued, not deliberately confrontational, but still perhaps perceived as antagonistic. We played quite well, compositional form suffered somewhat, but expectations were questioned: ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before!’ (Queen Charlotte sound engineer).
The Hague 24th January 2008
Tag gallery in Den Hagg is an arts space consisting of a gallery, performance area and office. We struggled to park the van as the entire street was being regenerated – we had to carry all the equipment by hand through a building site, a distance of over 200 meters! The gig felt good, exploring the torch in mouth strategy again, pulses from John’s analogue electronics worked well with Paul’s turntable manipulations. Musically, the performance felt far more brutal than either of us thought we were capable of. The visual projections were less than ideal – a small screen, some distance from the audience with our movements casting shadows onto it. During post–gig discussion we received some constructive criticism from Kier Neuringer, artistic director of Tag Gallery and a well–known local musician/live cinema practitioner: ‘My biggest problem with it was the video, the music was visceral and alive, the visuals were not, very little correlation between the two. The only time it really worked was the couple of times when the vinyl scratching could be seen, when the music stops, the visual does not. It carries on...a big no no!’ In highlighting the fact that we are musicians not visual practitioners Keir’s comments raised questions with which we still grapple, giving us plenty of food for thought whilst traveling towards the final performances of the tour. For example, what is our relationship to a flat, rectangular, framed projection? Do the visuals distract from the interaction inherent in our music making? We could not remove our equipment from Tag Gallery until 11am the next morning and then we got lost trying to navigate around a one–way (foreign) system, finally leaving The Hague at midday. This was not a great start to a ten–hour, 700km drive from The Hague to Berlin.
Salon Bruit: Berlin 25th January 2008
On arriving in Berlin we once again got very lost, after various phone calls to the promoter it turns out that there was more than one ‘Kastanienallee’ in Berlin and we were at the opposite side of the city. Feeling stressed and nearing a point of total exhaustion we were barely on speaking terms, so opted to play a stripped down, mostly analogue set with no visuals at 2am! This experience was a revelation. There were and are still are compromises inherent to our visual setup; for Paul the latency introduced via digital processing of time–coded vinyl is felt as a lack of control and tactility, and the sound of digital audio files does not compare with the sound, flexibility and ‘realness’ of analogue vinyl. For John not having to setup behind a table and in front of a laptop camera allowed him to readopt his preferred floor–based performance setup with no audience/performer separation. Crouching on the floor surrounded by tactile technologies facilitated musical chaos and accidental triggering of audio, an inherent part of his practice.
Club Transmediale at Maria 29th January 2008
After much debate we decided to divide the performance into two halves, with and without visuals. Performing under the Club Transmediale theme of ‘Unpredictable’ the start of our performance was fitting as John’s light sensors accidentally triggered huge amounts of sub bass frequencies at extreme volume. This came as somewhat of a surprise to Paul since it was a place Tron Lennon would usually reach mid–way into a performance and not at the very beginning! Nevertheless we embraced the challenge, playing a difficult but enjoyable 25 minute music set. For the last fifteen minutes we turned up the visuals and it was great to see them projected onto the huge screens surrounding the main room. We thank CETL for their assistance in this valuable experience.
