From Broad Strokes To Inner Depths: Tycho Are Just Starting To Dig

Californian ambient/electronic all-instrumental project Tycho have only visited Australian shores twice before across the course of a 15-year career, and they are about to crack it for a third as they join the Laneway Festival across the nation. Main man Scott Hansen, speaking from on tour in Seoul, Korea, is keen to emphasise the very visual and interactive nature of their show for uninitiated Aussie punters.

"I love doing this and I've worked my whole life to be able to do this full time, so I don't intend to quit any time soon."

"It's meant to be immersive, the video is just as big a part of it as the audio component," he describes, "there's four of us, so we try to split up the instrumental duties equally, and we have a drummer. So it's basically trying to recreate the process of how the songs were written in the studio. So from our perspective it's a pretty straightforward set-up, an instrumental rock band set-up and then we have the huge screen and the projector, which is a big part of it."

That immersive, theatrical and visual element in the band's sound prompts the question of what non-musical aspects of life inspire his writing, and Hansen's response is possibly a little more organic than one might expect, given the high tech nature of Tycho's sound. "I think being in nature mostly, being outdoors, and having that type of experience," he offers, "I'm always trying to pull on those themes and that experience. But I think that, with the new record, I think it was a little more inward-looking from an emotional standpoint, I was trying to build more personal themes in there than the previous stuff had, and not work with such broad concepts. But I think, at the end of the day, there's always going to be that natural-world element in the music."

While you can certainly trace the origins of the project back that 15-year period, Hansen reveals that he only really started taking his music completely seriously as we entered the current decade, and he feels there are definitely two phases to his music career. "2002 was the very first time I started doing anything with the name Tycho," he recalls, "but it really got going properly around 2010, when we really started touring. Before that I was a graphic designer and I'd do this in my spare time, and not really spending much time on the road or really even much time writing music, I would just kind of do it here and there."

In fact, he feels that in a lot of ways he and the band are really only just starting, and they have a long journey ahead of them, if all goes according to plan. "You never know where you're going to be that far down the road, but I love doing this and I've worked my whole life to be able to do this full time, so I don't intend to quit any time soon, I definitely have a lot more albums and live shows left in me."