Tycho and Beacon play the Original Cafe 11

By Ryan Buffa | gargoyle@flagler.edu
Videos and Photos by Phillip Sunkel IV

As the warm Florida winter gave St. Augustine a dreamy spring fever, so did Tycho and Beacon, as they played the Original Café 11 on Jan. 28th.

Beacon, an electronic mesh of bass synths and sensual falsettos, opened the night in a downtempo trance. The band is composed of Thomas Mullarney III and Jacob Gossett, a Greenpoint, Brooklyn based duo who bring back a dash of ’90s and spoonful of contemporary R&B. The cherry on top is battle between the deliscious vocals and the mehanics of the synths. The duo played songs such as “No body,” “Exhal” and “Girl in a coma” off their latest EP, “No body.”

Tycho, the music project of San Francisco based artist and producer Scott Hansen, stopped in town for the tour of their latest album”Dive,” released in Oct. 2011. It has been a busy year for the band, as before the “Dive” tour, Tycho joined fellow electro-pop band, Little Dragon, for a fall 2011 tour. “It was a great experience. They’re favorite band of mine so when they asked us to support on that tour I was really excited,” Hansen said. “They all ended up being really great people and we learned a lot from their show; they do an incredible job representing the music in a live context.”

But Hansen has is own unique ideas of how to present his music project live. Along with being a musician, he is also a talented graphic artist, and creates design and images to play during performances. It is as if he is sending people into a foreign world with its own soundtrack. Anything from space to hot air balloons are screened in vibrant rotating colors that transcends into a story of its own.

“For me, the music and design are one and the same,” Hansen said. “The eventual goal of this whole project is to create a full length motion piece scored by the music. I am working towards this with the live show where I project animations and film in sync with the music.”

Tycho creates a ying and yang effect of music and art to create a show that feels like a true journey or experience, like walking into a painting. Hansen utilies his skills as an artist and a musician to correlate the two art forms. And as his skill grows, so do Tycho’s albums.

“I think the album that preceded it [“Past is Prologued”] was more a celebration or ode to the external, natural world while this album [“Dive”] was more an introspective journey. Still indirectly linked to the world around me but more bout how those experiences and ideas change when they are perceived and stored as memories. I guess you could say the first album was a photograph while this one was a painting.

Before Dive, Hansen took time off from releasing music to focus on his visual work and strengthen his skills as a musician through gaining further knowledge about audio engineering, recording and “general

musicianship” he said. Hansen was thrown into the music industry at the age of 20, and believes he has grown musically in between albums as he spends more time learning about his music before writing and sitting in a recording booth.

“I wanted to get to the point where I felt my skills as a producer would allow me to create the album I had envisioned,” he said.