Music

[Life Is Beautiful 2014]

Life Is Beautiful: Tycho’s transportive sunset performance stuns at LIB

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Tycho at Life Is Beautiful
Photo: Corlene Byrd

If Life is Beautiful organizers programmed indie dance act Holy Ghost!’s Friday set at the worst possible time—which was anytime before dusk—they got it completely right by scheduling San Francisco quartet Tycho the next day right as the sun went down. The only thing more gorgeous than the increasingly violet sky was the sound—a headphone-ready merging of instrumental post-punk and ambient electronic dance music—being played by Scott Hansen and his three live bandmates. And as if the songs and the setting (and the hallucinatory videos on the back screen) weren’t evocative enough, the sound system delivering them to the restless but attentive audience could not have sounded clearer or been placed at a more ideal volume. To take it all in was to be overwhelmed with the perfection of the 45-minute set—like, how are we having this moment at a temporary stage in a parking lot?

Life Is Beautiful: Day 2

Tycho makes rhythmic music that sounds real, largely in part due to its use of analog synthesizers and instruments, such as guitars and drums. Its slower tempos all but disqualify a conventional dance music classification, though many of the songs the band performed last night certainly got bodies moving, their movements suggesting more of a groove-along than a full-fledged boogie. Songs seemed constructed around dominant, chorus-like melody lines via guitar or synthesizer—often mirroring the echoed chime of the Edge—with a variety of structures and built up with increasing layers of instrumentation, with dynamics and meter changing to make each song’s narrative all the more unique. On the more strident numbers, where the melodies slice the air rather than float in it, the resulting rock/dance balance approximates a collaboration between Explosions in the Sky and Eric Prydz—an ethereal sound made tangible thanks to Hansen’s emotive chord progressions and the depth of the rhythm section.

Given all those entry points, festival programmers have kept booking Tycho for their various events. By putting in some serious time on the circuit, the band has managed to increase its fans beyond audiophiles and fans of jam-esque electronic music (a la STS9, which had a very similar crowd last year on the same stage during Life is Beautiful). And during Tycho’s own jams—which felt more like transcendent meditations—one couldn’t ignore the crowd’s more exuberant dancers, who looked like they were hearing Tycho for the first time and zealously went into dancefloor mode. They were clearly caught in a moment—and in our way, so were the rest of us.

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