Live Review: Tycho

Tycho has always inhabited the space between the natural world and the digital. He's a hiker, an avid outdoorsman and a synth nerd. As his career has progressed, his music has slowly drifted away from samples and atmosphere, and towards rhythm and drive. His latest record, Epoch, continues that trend.

His show at the Metro was more of the same from last time around. That is to say, your mileage would have varied. Late-era Tycho fans would likely have loved it. Those wanting more; wanting progress, wanting evolution, or those wanting less — those yearning for a retreat back to his more insular ambient phase — might have been disappointed.

It was a good show, one boasting his signature array of beautiful images of natural scenery, as well as a tightly controlled group of multi-instrumentalists, and Tycho himself — Scott Hansen, the benign dictator — looking quite peaceful behind a wall of analogue synths. Hansen's sound is a perfect marriage of sun-warped melody and krautrock perfectionism. The venue, with sound bouncing off the Metro's many unforgiving hard surfaces, suited the latter. Rory O'Connor's clockwork precision on drums was magnetic. His patterns had just enough detail in them to keep us from becoming hopelessly hypnotised, and the crowd responded to each subtle switch and shift.

As far as melody goes, if we're being honest, most of his songs these days sound the same, so listing a set is largely irrelevant (for those playing at home, he opened with Glider, the opening track from the new LP, walked through most of Epoch, hit us with Awake, a fan favourite, and closed with Receiver and Montana as his encore). That said, his 'digital-hippy' act is pretty charming. His binary interpretation of what he loves in nature is something to be admired, not criticised. The fans that sold out his show on Thursday would probably agree.