TRIGONometry- “The Music Industry Tries to Kill Us, Therefore We Kill the Music Industry”- an interview with Rainer Lange, guitarist of Instrumental Power Rock band Trigon.
By Phil Jackson

Apparently Rolling Stone magazine has taken out an ad in The New York Times which reads:
“Because of you (Record labels who crack down on peer-to-peer file sharing-ed.), millions of kids will stop wasting time listening to new music and seeking out new bands…With any luck they won’t talk about music at all.”
(Source- ‘Computer Active’ #125; 28 Nov- 11 Dec, 2002)
Compare this to the statement made by Rainer Lange, guitarist with Trigon:
“We like to invite everybody to copy our CDs and all CDs have the
EFF-Open-Audio-License. So feel free to broadcast it as much as you like.”

Introductions
I first made contact with Rainer Lange the guitarist of German independent rock crossover band, a rather enigmatic and elliptical description of the band’s music on mp3.de from where the band’s considerable musical output can be downloaded free of charge. Rainer was curious as to how I had got a hold of one of their CDs ‘Beschrankte Haftung’ I explained to Rainer that Thierry Sportouche, the editor of Acid Dragon, had sent me the CD to review. I had listened to it a couple of times but, given how busy I was at that time, I wasn’t impressed enough to justify a review. However, I was happy to share with Rainer my impressions of ‘Beschrankte Haftung’ as follows:
“There is obvious talent among the musicians but too much similarity between the 16 tracks, mostly heavy rock with a slight blues leaning evident on the final track. I should imagine Hendrix and other guitar ‘heroes’ are inspirations.
Many of the tracks start off with a basic drum pattern and there is absence of 'light and shade' meaning an absence of quieter, more reflective passages. The use of sound bytes would be another way to break the music up. I have great respect for the musicianship but wonder about the direction of the band on this release.”
I offered the observation that it is very difficult to succeed with a straight guitar/ bass/ drums line-up nowadays and hoped my comments were constructive.
Rainer did find my comments constructive and said that I was close to his own opinion of this release (except for the Hendrix comparison)
(It turns out that ‘Beschrankte Haftung’ is only the second of 20 CDs released by Trigon to be recorded in a studio, the other being ‘Nova’ in 1990.)
Rainer went on to explain that Trigon had three drummers on the CD and “our friend Kirk (Erickson) and main drummer (I think Rainer was referring to Daniel Beckmann) was about to go back to America so we wanted to bring the actual musical situation on CD no matter how ‘commercial’ or how linear in its style the result may be - it was a completely improvised session in the studio anyway which explains the regular starting with the drum patterns and absence of arranged breaks. And to say a word to the topic ‘success’: Commercial success is not what we are looking for :-) (Do send us a lot of money and we do not give it back) we like to spread that thing and reach more and more people and the most important thing is... FUN! (In that we are pretty successful :-) for example we did play on the last Herzberg Festival and in result getting offers for other bigger open air concerts- that is what we like to do.”

Trigon live
Rainer sent me a copy of Trigon’s set at the Burg Herzberg Festival 2002.
It begins with what the band consider one of their best compositions ‘Dekadenz and Korruption’ and the music flows with a dynamic vibe that is difficult to quantify or pin down, mesmerising guitar runs over solid rhythm work from Rainer’s brother Stefan on bass and Danile Backmann on drums. Surely Zappa must be the most obvious comparison, very much a case of ‘Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar’. A ‘blues’ ‘Black Syphilis’ is introduced and I realise that although the ‘formula’ is similar to ‘Beschrankte Haftung’ the execution is better as the band expand into a space afforded by heading for the 6 minute mark (As I said earlier Trigon’s best numbers for me are the longest tracks on ‘HeiZEN’ where the band reach out and grab 7, then 9 then 10 minutes.) Getting back to the ‘blues’ number- ‘Black Syphilis’ is definitely becoming one of my favourite’s in Trigon’s repertoire- this is one I would be requesting if ever lucky enough to be at one those ‘public jam sessions’ Rainer talks about later

A Word or 2 on Improvisation
The way Trigon go about their music interests me greatly. Indeed the improvisational approach increasingly adopted by bands throughout the world- Australia’s Sh-man’tra and America’s Escapade are two notable examples- intrigues me in a world of overproduced sanitised and commercialised crap.
As Frank Zappa said, “The creation and destruction of harmonic and ‘statistical’ tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and ‘regular’ throughout is, for me, the equivalent to watching a movie with only ‘good guys’ in it, or eating cottage cheese.”
(‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’ , 1989, Picador)
Back to the live CD
Of course, Trigon put the word ‘ZEN’ into as many of their compositions as possible and ‘ZENsation’, an impossible rhythm petering out rather unexpectedly.
‘Wenn wir dich rauchen, schreien wir’ could and should have been much longer, an electrical intoxication that paves the way for a rousing finale unexpectedly entitled in English- ‘Blue Time’.
‘HeiZEN’- finite without boundaries
On Trigon’s best CD ‘HeiZEN’ (of course!) there is a telling statement:
“It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular. We have recorded each composition with one thought- that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating. It has taken every shred of our combined musical and technical knowledge to achieve this.”
These are not the words of the band, they are taken from the album cover of the 1971 LP ‘Acquiring The Taste’ by Gentle Giant (The one that begins with ‘Pantagruel’s Nativity’), like Van Der Graaf Generator one of the most unique and influential progressive rock bands
Trigon to me are living proof of the old oxymoron ‘FINITE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES’ by which I mean their music is spacious and unquantifiable yet the ‘groove’, the ‘hook’, the ‘riff’ whatever you like to call it is there for the exiguous specimen, the ‘rare bird’- a listener with a receptive ear and an open mind to ‘seek out and find.’
I e-mailed Rainer with my impressions:
“I must congratulate the band on 'HeiZEN'- it is a great advance on
'Beshcrankte Haftung'. I think the longer pieces suit the band better and I
particularly enjoyed listening to 'Einmal durchpusten bitte!' and tracks 6
through to 8 (‘’Aktivierung des Seibstzerstorungsmechanismus’, ‘Apokalyptische ubergabe’ and ‘Trii auf die Euphoriebremse’)- as I listen more I'm sure I will come to appreciate the whole CD. I hear more Frank Zappa improvisation on 'Heizen' and thought of Robin Trower at times when I listened to the live album.”

Eclipsed Magazine on Trigon (November, 2002 #47)
‘The guitar with long solos and improvisations is located in the foreground embedded in the rhythm group between bass and drums. Trigon likes to expose the guitar. For one person this may be inordinate ornamental noise, for the others a guitar orgy, a never ending jam session, which is more than mere improvisation. The music may develop spontaneously, but it is designed. It is more than obvious how the instruments are ‘fine-tuned’. This is your music, the music you have in your ‘internal ear’, imagining your all-time favourite personal guitarist (Whoever could that be?), jamming. Trigon does not make a megalomaniac declaration of war against the music industry but the philosophy of the band from Karlsruhe pissed off by the Musik Biz who take all their musical fate in self-direction, music production and publishing of albums into their own hands.”

Rainer on Trigon
I try to explain what Trigon is doing:
Rainer Lange - guitar (40 years)
Stefan Lange - bass (36 years)
DanielBeckmann-drums (23years)
“Trigon is normally three persons (there was a time we had three drummers) who like each other and who are pretty good musicians (what do you expect after a quarter of a century of making music... even we learned a bit :-) We meet at the practice room two times a week and there we produce spontaneous sounds. The more often we do that, the more organized it sounds. And after 13 years of Trigon we are at a point where we personally are feeling that the music is really representing us very much. Imagine the scene in the practice room (which has a big audience part with chairs and sofas for about 20 people - so every ‘practice ’is a live event/happening):HI! HMPF! WHAT? TIRED? HMPF START IT! NO, YOU START! .Then someone starts the first tone and the second and someone decides eventually to play with and the third fills the noise and there- a riff is born and a groove happens and everybody is awake now. After ten seconds everybody has a smile on his face and starts to shake. Now we look at that riff from all sides, wring it there and shake it there and tickle the animal in it and then give it a rest. That way we can play about 30 minutes, followed by the first burn out after doing everything 100 % improvised in that intensity. Here the audience participation comes in. Some of the folks make a fun out of it bringing CDs from other bands asking us to ‘Trigonize’ this or that riff. Which brings us over the next 30 minutes or so. All of the time a tape recorder is running
and when there are older sessions which are repeatable, we give them funny names and try to arrange an intro and perhaps a bridge so we can play it live with only 70 % of improvisation and enabling us to make a kind of a set list for live gigs. That´s good for the next 30 minutes. And then is wish time. 20 CDs are lying around and the audience can pick out stuff. When everybody’s ears are finished (We are kinda loud :-)) we go to our regular pub.
You see, we do two different styles of music:
#1.Totally improvised. Not pre discussed
#2. Harvested reproducible output of the above - partially arranged for live
gigs – practiced so we do have a ‘public jam’-CDs which are #1 and live-CDs which are #2.And now we wait for #3, the studio CD, which is planned as a concept album but we have no input of money so we give away all #1 CDs for free and the #2 CDs for price of cost. So that album has to wait.
Often there is a fantastic tune on a public jam CD which never will be
played live, ´cause we are not able to catch the quintessence of it in
trying to repeat it... That is the reason, that the titles on the live CDs
are less experimental and probably more groovy. On the public jam CDs we do tolerate ‘errors’ which we don´t do live.And now to our last public jam CD "HeiZEN": we have learned, that people either love it MADLY, or hate it (trying to collect all of them, to burn them in a public event)We personally love that CD so much, that we are going to have a problem doing something similarly intense again, reaching that kind of border creates a kind of fear but there’s a word about borders:
to boldly go where no man has gone before... :-)
I, as a guitarist, always had the idea of NOT sounding like someone else. But if you know Satriani, Zappa, Akkerman (from Focus) and Bunka (from Embryo) you probably hear the influences. My brother Stefan on bass plays music together with me since 1984 without a break. He does like more the melodic stuff. When I listened to ZZ Top and Deep Purple, he did King Crimson and Eloy.
Our fantastic young drummer Daniel Beckmann (who hopefully stays with those old farts) is being tortured by us since 2½ years. He is playing drums
for 10 years coming from hardcore and the darker sides of metal. No name of a band he is mentioning we do know and otherwise his musical socialisation is completely different! Those differences makes the use of style drawers obsolete. If suddenly some phrases of reggae appear between a polka groove, changed into bass´n´drum- who cares? It´s irrelevant. That’s why we chose the style "Heavy-Zen-Jazz". Heavy- sure we do not sound like soft pop. Jazz ´cause it is improvised (Do you remember Zappa saying of "Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny"?) and
Zen ´cause it is a kind of a collective meditation when we play together.
That’s the origin of the Band name - we are three individuals and form the
sides of a triangle There is a little bit of an esoteric aspect (three become one in doing music) but we are light years away from any world music/esoteric thing.
We like to invite everybody to copy our CDs and all CDs have the
EFF-Open-Audio-License. So feel free to broadcast it as much as you like.
Go to
http://www.heavyzenjazz.de for free downloads
and contact
rainer@heavyzenjazz.de
if you wish to support the band financially a little bit by ordering CDs at small cost. As the Eclipsed article made clear, “Trigon won’t please some listeners but with a foible for guitar dominated sounds you too can discover the joy of music made with creativity, spontaneity and a shot of insanity.”

You can order the Trigon CDs via Zeitgeist Distro