Posts by Scott

I’m very pleased to announce that a new Tycho single was released today. It’s been a long time coming, can’t wait to share the rest of the record. You can also pre-order the new album at the shop starting today.

We’ve announced a bunch of tour dates over the coming months:

MAR 19 Santa Cruz, CA
MAR 20 San Francisco, CA
MAR 26 London, United Kingdom
MAR 27 Paris, France
MAR 28 Zurich, Switzerland
MAR 29 Milan, Italy
MAR 30 Berlin, Germany
APR 04 Denver, CO
APR 05 Fort Collins, CO
APR 07 Omaha, NE
APR 08 Minneapolis, MN
APR 09 Milwaukee, WI
APR 10 Chicago, IL
APR 11 Pontiac, MI
APR 12 Toronto, Canada
APR 14 Montreal, Canada
APR 15 South Burlington, VT
APR 17 Cambridge, MA
APR 18 New York, NY
APR 19 Philadelphia, PA
APR 20 Washington, DC
APR 22 Charlottesville, VA
APR 23 Carrboro, NC
APR 24 Charlotte, NC
APR 25 Orlando, FL
APR 27 Kingston, GA
APR 28 New Orleans, LA
APR 29 Houston, TX
MAY 01 Austin, TX
MAY 05 Albuquerque, NM
MAY 06 Tucson, AZ
MAY 08 Los Angeles, CA
MAY 10 Sacramento, CA

See you this spring!

Just in time to remind you there’s no snow in Tahoe this year, it’s Capa in Color. Above are some selections from Robert Capa’s postwar photography of Europena alpine resorts.

More photos from Capa in Color

ISO50 Playlist 17 – Compiled By Heathered Pearls & Tycho
Track Listing
Tycho – Awake
Gardens & Villa – Bullet Train
Midlake – Antiphon
Atoms For Peace – Dropped
Nitemoves – Veaquis
Clu – Jade
Jon Hopkins – Breathe This Air feat. Purity Ring
Keep Shelly in Athens – Madmen Love (Braxton/Palmer Remix)
Fort Romeau – Jete?e
Todd Terje – Spiral
Dauwd – Heat Division (Tim Goldsworthy Remix)
Sly-One – Come to Mine (HNNY Mix)
Drake – Too Much ft. Sampha (Jessie An
Clubfeet – Cape Town (Panama Remix)
Dark Sky – Rare Bloom
Beautiful Swimmers – Running Over
Evan Michael – After All
Almunia – 3 ode to mom
Erlend Øye – La Prima Estate
Rollmottle – Mustang 1966 (Black Fastback Rmx)
Isolée – Allowance
Four Tet – Lion
Xeno & Oaklander – Sheen
The Range – Metal Swing
Absolutely Free – Clothed Woman, Sitting
Automelodi – S’rait Bon D’s’Revoir
Museum of Love – Monotronic

Past playlists are available in the Playlist Archive

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVwSYX7jIM0

This is like the archetype for every retro-styled with the synth-soundtracked logo build in and the crackly PBS voice over. Can’t believe this was made in 1980, would have guessed earlier from the quality.

Video Link

As you may have noticed I haven’t been very active on the blog over the past year. This is because I had decided to focus solely on my music project, Tycho for a while. I spent the last 9 months or so working with the band on a new record which is now complete. Of course, Tycho is very much an audio / visual project so I’m still working consistently on design whether it be album covers, show posters, or online assets. I was working on the cover art and developing the packaging in parallel with the recording process this time around. We recently shared the final artwork for this LP, entitled Awake (listen to the title track here). I’ll go more into the reasoning behind and making of the artwork later, but for now here is a quote from this Reddit discussion of the cover art that I commented on:

This design was mean to be a flag; more of a symbol than what I would think of as traditional album art. I felt that, with physical mediums disappearing, album art didn’t necessarily have to fit a given format and I wanted something that could be readily transported.

If you look at earlier artwork you’ll see that I was pursuing a more maximalist / photographic direction for Tycho (e.g. http://imgur.com/a/kk93f ). But this album has a more stripped down, visceral thing going on and I wanted that reflected in the artwork. Really this is meant to be an inconized form of the sun / circle motif present in a lot of the Tycho cover art to date. Kind of like a unifying symbol for all the output that preceded this release. I see this, for various reasons, as the first true Tycho album and so wanted to focus everything into a simple form that encapsulated that idea. On a side note, there are eight color bands in the circle, each one representing a track.

The beauty of creating the artwork for the music over all these years is that I am free to develop a cohesive lineage with the imagery. From what I have seen of my peers over these past 13 or so years as a designer, we generally tend towards simplification as we go along and I think that is an important part of design: efficiency of communication. Whether this particular design is effective in that respect obviously isn’t something I have the objectivity to comment on, but that was the goal at least.

The album will be released on March 18th, 2014. Here is the track listing:

Tycho – Awake (2014)

1. Awake
2. Montana
3. L
4. Dye
5. See
6. Apogee
7. Spectre
8. Plains

And those who were following along on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter know that we released the artwork first via a 9×9 grid. I printed the artwork, cut it up, and photographed it using various pieces of musical equipment as backdrops. Here’s the grid in one image:

Makeshift lighting setup. All my camera gear was stolen recently so limping along with a point and shoot setup for now.

You can listen to the title track from Awake now on the Tycho Soundcloud page

More to come soon, thanks for the support!

This Mercedes-Benz W196R won the 1954 German and Swiss Grands Prix with Juan Manuel Fangio behind the wheel. It sold at auction this year for an astounding $29,619,826. Love how it hasn’t been restored; the wear lends an authentic feel.

More Info / Source (thanks Nicholas)

Did an interview with The Great Discontent. Talked about the relationship between design and music and the making of the new Tycho album.

http://thegreatdiscontent.com/scott-hansen

No clue how I got to 2013 without seeing Kazumasa Nagai’s work. Truly inspiring. Who are the posters artists doing this caliber of work today? Do you think the poster-as-artform medium is dying?

Via Pink Tentacle

I’ve been working with local SF brand Mission Workshop on some upcoming projects and they sent photographer Marc Lemoine along with us for the recent Tycho tour. He got some great shots from the trip, above are a few early edits. Excited to share what we have coming up!

We’re wrapping up the last Tycho tour of 2013 with a show tonight (11/13/13) in Santa Ana at The Observatory and then on to San Francisco for the show with Pretty Lights on 11/29 at Bill Graham Civic Center.

Hope to see you out there!