Designing Tycho with Musician Scott Hansen
To see more of Scott’s designs and photography, check out @tychomusic on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.
“There’s so much content that you need to keep pushing out to keep people interested — and it’s ideal for me because I love doing that stuff.” So says San Francisco’s Scott Hansen, known to ambient electro lovers as Tycho (@tychomusic). Despite his success as a songwriter and producer, Scott sees himself less as a musician and more as a designer, lending his keen sense of composition and saturated style to every element of Tycho, from the music to the album art to the merchandise.
“I love bouncing back and forth,” he says. “I start to get bored of design when I work on it too long, and vice versa with music, so it’s kind of a perfect balance.”
From the time he was a kid, using pen on paper, to the moment he first picked up a camera, Scott has been trying to express a certain vibrant repose. Still, it took 15 years of struggle and trial and error to find creative peace. Before 2011’s Dive, Tycho’s third album and first through Ghostly International, he paid the bills as a freelance designer under the moniker ISO50. Music was something sacred he kept to the side, an unregimented outlet all his own. But that changed when Scott went to Black Rock Desert for Burning Man in 2010.
“That was the moment where it was time to jump off the cliff and see what happens, because I’d always been really scared to do that and kept one foot on each side,” he says. “That’s why the cover of Dive is a picture I took out there, and the cover of [2014’s] Awake is supposed to be an iconized version of that same imagery.”
For two years, he “hemorrhaged” his savings in the name of a dream that eventually came true. Today, Scott now tours with his friends under the Tycho name, while dedicating time on the road to the project’s visual component.
“It’s just a really powerful thing to have full control over the way something is presented,” says Scott. “Even the music is designed for me. I feel like my process is very design-oriented and it’s very similar to the way I create imagery and video. I don’t see a clear delineation between the two.”
Without clients to answer to, Scott’s vision is free and unbridled.
“When you’re younger, you don’t realize it’s a vision. It’s just background noise. It seems normal to you,” he says. “Then, slowly, you realize, no, this is something personal to me that I really want to express to other people that I’m not able to articulate in any other way.”
– Kat Bein for Instagram @music
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