Scott Hansen’s eternal balancing act

In the project’s third decade, Tycho has never looked more confident. As the four-piece live band, the brainchild of mastermind producer Scott Hansen, steps onto the Pier Stage at Portola in September 2024, tens of thousands of festival-goers roar with applause.

Hansen, now 47 years old and dressed in white chinos and a pink shirt, takes to his cockpit of synthesizers, MIDI controllers, guitars and outboard effects. Meanwhile, Zac Brown — in an effortlessly cool auburn suit — picks up his Gibson Les Paul; Rory O’Connor sits behind the drums donning yellow-tinted Tony Stark-style shades, and Billy Kim positions himself for bass and rhythm guitar duties with a zipped-up parka jacket, looking like a chillwave Oasis member.

“It’s good to be home!” says Bay Area-based Hansen on the mic after mesmerising performances of Phantom — a four-to-the-floor, nu-disco-style track from his new album Infinite0 Health — and fan favourites Hours and A Walk from the acclaimed 2011 album, Dive. These ethereal tracks may differ from the dance tracks Justice, Jamie xx, LP Giobbi and Disclosure will later belt out on the same stage, but the crowd is rapt. It’s as if this once-niche chillwave artist had transcended into an electronica rockstar.

When we talk over the phone, Hansen is more placid than rockstar. We geek out on plugins and synths, reflect on the challenges modern tech has brought for musicians, and joke about how parenthood has brought an end to his post-midnight studio sessions.

“I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old,” Hansen says. “It’s amazing. But it also, of course, compresses your time. There’s the normal workday — 8 am to 5 pm is basically what I do — then we make dinner and get the kids down, and then I can maybe go back and work for a couple more hours.”

Hansen’s current routine is certainly more rigid than when he first rose to prominence in the late 00s. Some tracks on his most revered albums — 2006’s Past Is Prologue, 2011’s Dive, and 2014’s Awake — were made during free-flowing stints with no curfew.

“I was actually digging through the older songs…Awake, for instance; I looked at the timestamps of the recordings, and it’s like 2 am, 4 am, 5:30 am…(The song was made) in like a 10-hour period. I had the energy and resilience to pull that off, but now I stay up past midnight and almost feel sick (the next day),” Hansen says with a laugh.

The producer revisited these earlier works ahead of creating Infinite Health, partly to update their performances for his 2025 live tour in North America, Europe and Japan starting in January, but also to channel elements of his earlier workflow.

“The goal for me was to get back to how I made music in the early 2000s, that led up to (2011’s) Dive” Hansen says. “At the beginning of Tycho, I was more like, ‘let’s write a song with synthesizers, and then maybe we’ll layer drums and guitars later.’ Infinite Health goes back to that bedroom electronic production style; trying to make the foundation of the song out of just electronic tools.”

Hansen cut his teeth making music primarily with digital synths, workstations and samples, which you can hear, for example, in his debut EP in 2001, The Science Of Patterns. As his style and live show developed, physical instruments became more of a focus, particularly with the recording contributions of Brown on guitar and O’Connor on drums. Returning to his earlier workflow didn’t mean omitting these crucial real-world instruments and performances — the album also sees drum performances from Kaelin Ellis on Totem and vocals from Cautious Clay — but it did mean that Infinite Health became more of a “plugin album” than previous albums, Hansen says.

In 2023, Hansen partnered with music gear marketplace Reverb to auction off $160,000 worth of his equipment that he felt was just “rotting away” in his studio Everything sold, and Hansen subsequently connected with buyers and talked with them about how he used each piece of gear and some of its history. The studio clearout also encouraged him to use more software — a plugin emulation of the Oberheim Four Voice rather than the hardware version he sold, for example. This change in workflow meant he could alter elements of each track throughout the creation of the album, whereas previously he would record each take, complete with effects, directly into his DAW, at which point it was tough to make delicate tweaks.

“Sometimes,” he says, ‘“you’ll make a sound or tone selection that makes sense and gets you pumped up and inspired in the moment. But when it comes time to mix the record, it might actually sound quite harsh.” Hansen adds that, with the plugins he used, he had more freedom to swap signal chains around — “put a delay before the amp instead after”’ — and change how much an effect could be heard in the track.

“Of course, there are special, magic sounds here and there on the album,” Hansen caveats. “The intro sound on Consciousness Felt — I just don’t think I could have created that with plugins. That was a real Sequential Prophet-5 going through an Elektron Analog Heat. There was just something about the way the filter was set up perfectly.” Elsewhere, the Moog Minimoog, Prodigy and Matriarch synths are a staple of the Tycho sound, along with a plethora of effects pedals.

Hansen has been making music since his youth in the California capital of Sacramento, leaning heavily into synths since the beginning. Among his first electronic instruments was the Roland MC-303, which wasn’t so well-received upon its 1996 release. Still, Hansen says that it got him “stoked” about making electronic music.

Other synths Hansen used on the album include Softube’s Model 84, a plugin that emulates the Roland Juno-106, and which sparked the idea for the album’s title track. He lauds the software as “one of the best soft synths ever made…It’s just like a real synthesizer. It’s crazy. I don’t know what they’re doing over (at Softube) but their synth plugins seem way ahead of everybody else’s.”

Producers, musicians and beatmakers often seek out the piece of gear or technique that will help them create a particular sound and debate whether to use digital or analogous gear. It’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly when there are so many tantalising products on the market. But Hansen has a tidbit that might help:

“You don’t need every sound to be magical and have all that character…The most basic DAWs have enough tools in them to be able to make, like, 90 per cent of all music ever created. So now it’s just down to you learning how to use it, not the lack of access, which I think is so powerful.”

Hansen has spent most of his life learning how to use technology to make art, whether for his visual work as ISO50 or for Tycho. Sometimes, he says, that’s ended up with him “burning the candle at both ends,” and he used Infinite Health as a means to express a plan for “a more sustainable way of going about all this and being able to envision myself doing this in 10 years.”

Keeping healthy and getting outside to connect with nature is one way Hansen finds balance — he’s actually speaking to us while walking around his Oakland neighbourhood (“I always use my breaks to take walks”).

“I grew up in what was a rural area of rolling green hills and ranches, the river and all these beautiful open spaces, natural areas,” explains Hansen. “Then I moved to the Bay Area, San Francisco, and now live in Oakland. I don’t really tend to interact with nature on the same level as I did earlier in my life, and I just always worry, like, ‘What’s the impact of that?’”

On a more existential level, he says Infinite Health is also about making peace with mortality, or “understanding that you’re sort of on this continuum. A lot of people came before you, and a lot of people are gonna come after you.”

“I guess, since having kids and just seeing new life come into the world, you realise that you’re not the centre of the universe and there’s something more important than you.”

Hansen’s also finding balance in his online life. Artists and musicians are under more pressure than ever to directly connect with their fans through social media platforms — thankfully, he’s accustomed to this, cultivating an online presence since the early 00s on blogs and filesharing sites. But even he struggles with giant platforms such as Instagram, a place which he once thought was the “best outlet” for communicating with like-minded people and fans.

“Man, being an artist and putting yourself out there these days…That’s been an interesting thing to watch shift,” he says. “Just to see the dialogue change over time on those platforms. I feel like (the Tycho) fan base is so cool and accepting and understanding, and they’re just along for the ride. But on other people’s pages and on YouTube, I see people paring things down, and being so opinionated and so negative. It makes you start to believe that the rest of the world has this negative tone. But then you go into the real world and talk to people, and people are really cool, kind and caring. So (the online world has become) this ugly, funhouse mirror of what people are really like.”

To mitigate the negative online experiences on his pages, Hansen set up the Tycho Open Source Community in 2022. Here, fans get exclusive access to new music and content, plus early ticket and merch sales. Tycho’s recent Where You Are EP, released this December, was made available to Open Source members a day ahead of release. A Discord server is also open to members, where fans can chat with Hansen and get direct updates.

“The Open Source channel is just a place for cool stuff. It feels like (those communities) have been lost with the gating of social media,” Hansen says. “I think the ability for individuals, especially artists just starting out, to access those audiences is becoming less and less because the platforms are essentially becoming like networks to serve advertisements and boost things that already have legs and not really helping develop new ideas or new artists. I’m not saying that’s something they’re supposed to be doing, but that’s what you used to be able to leverage these tools for. I just feel like you can’t do that in the same way you once could.”

“I just want to directly connect with fans, know who they are, and give them access to things as a thank you.”

Hansen will likely soon be meeting many of his fans in real life, too, as he embarks on the 2025 Devices tour across the US East Coast and Canada, and the Infinite Health tour in Europe. Having already played a string of 26 shows across the US in 2024, plus over 15 years of prior performances, Hansen’s well-accustomed to setting up for a live show. But it’s still a challenge.

“I always get reminded of that when it’s time to start learning parts for the live show. Because I’m like, ‘Wait, I’ve played this part literally once!’ Almost everything you hear on any Tycho album is the first or the second take. There’s none of this learning it and playing it live and really understanding it…It’s definitely a collage.”

Listening through Tycho’s discography, you’ll notice that almost all of the tracks sound like a collage of sounds and instruments. Hansen says that the serene fan favourite track, A Walk comprises “at least two” separate tracks. Piecing together all of these elements is no easy job, and you’ll no doubt be impressed when you hear it all come together at a show.

As the sun sets on 2024 with six albums under his belt, a young family by his side and a lot of live shows on the horizon, we wonder whether a point will come when he stops making records as Tycho.

“Well, if I was looking at it that way, that would make me think I’m trying to get to some finish line, and I absolutely do not want to be at the finish line. I still love doing this. I don’t know in what capacity I’ll be doing this when I’m 60. But I feel healthy and in a good place with it. I still really enjoy it, and I still feel inspired and excited about the songs that I’m making. So, if that’s still happening, I don’t see why I’d ever stop.”

For more info on Tycho and the upcoming tours, head to tychomusic.com.