Live Review: Tycho, Rat & Co

The spectre of Boards Of Canada is flying high above this evening’s gig as both acts on the bill wear their influences quite proudly on their sleeves, deploying a live band approximation of swirling electronic sounds that bring to mind the elusive Scottish duo.

Rat & Co’s well received second album Binary seems to have broadened the Melbourne outfit’s popularity. Their sound is inspired by the minimalism of purely electronic ambient music, but presenting it in a band-based format attracts a little indie cred for the group. They shift from gritty industrial sounds that tend toward the experimental to lush washes of sound that ascend into fluid grooves and evoke sunnier images in the mind’s eye. The sonic details of their mix move beyond simple head-nodding beats and draw us into a deeper listening experience.

Much to our amusement, fans at the front of the venue determined to have a good time move into an interesting interpretive dance headspace as they pull shapes designed to tell us that they have discovered inner happiness is a very alternative plane of reality. As the room starts to pack out ahead of Tycho gracing the stage, it is interesting to see a younger audience of music lovers in love with the soft and floppy ambient sounds on offer tonight. Tycho keep the crowd waiting, but when they do appear there is a collective swoon as the music transports us somewhere dreamy.

Over the past ten years, Californian musician/graphic designer Scott Hansen has consistently released beautifully chilled, instrumental tunes. The release of Tycho’s much applauded Awake album saw Hansen evolve into a band as he started to work more collaboratively with other musicians. Tonight Hansen presents Tycho as a four-piece band conspicuously augmented by a couple of laptops. The Boards Of Canada influence is immediately obvious, but Tycho differ in that they offer seriously smooth, almost Balearic grooves that shy away from the jagged edges of experimentation. Guitarist Zac Brown drops wistful melodies into a surf of luscious, crashing waves crafted purely from synthetic sounds that reflect the golden hues of a setting sun. Drummer Rory O’Connor, who also drums for Com Truise, deals the beats with admirable precision. Amusingly, it looks like Hansen is just learning to play the guitar. He struggles a little when he picks a guitar up for a solo before blushing with embarrassment.

Tycho play with the kind of anonymity you would expect from a techno outfit, but present a big, immersive sound that steps away from the intimacy of their records. As fans get euphoric to these shimmering dreamy vibes, tunes from Awake, Dive and Past Is Prologue are homogenised so that they start to blur into each other. Encores get off to a false start because laptops have overheated and need a reboot. Once this is done, Hansen gets down with a techno remix of Awake before the rest of the band join him to bring down the night with Elegy. Fans who dance the night away leave grinning contentedly.