Sound Obsession

Tycho Date:  April 20, 2014 Venue:  9:30 Club, Washington, DC I rarely attend good shows on Easter Sunday - apart from the choir at the occasional sugar-fueled church service (admittedly, it's been a while).  This past Sunday I checked out Tycho at the 9:30 Club.  It happened to be 4/20 as well - a day famously dedicated to a different kind of ritual sacrament.  Despite that apparent contradiction, Tycho's mix of pastel colored grooves and heady atmospherics seemed entirely appropriate. Tycho ( Joe Davancens,  Rory O'Connor, Zac Brown, and Scott Hansen) Tycho, real name Scott Hansen, is a San Francisco-based indie-electronica musician and graphic artist who previously worked solo but took on a full band for his latest album Awake .  I had just reviewed Awake and was excited to see how Hansen would perform his latest material with new bandmates Zac Brown and Joe Davancens alternating between guitar, bass, and synthesizer, and R...

Tycho:   Awake Label:  Ghostly International Released:  March 18, 2014 6/10 Tycho is to Boards of Canada what Coldplay is to Radiohead.  After the latter band pioneered an appealing sound, then defiantly veered into "difficult" territory, the former band emerged to fill the new gap - shamelessly emulating the latter band's original pop sensibilities.  This isn't a total indictment however.  Why did Boards of Canada have to alienate fans by following up the infectious Super 8 trip-hop of their classic 1998 album Music Has the Right to Children with that onerous collection of nightmare vignettes Geogaddi in 2002?  Enter a host of unapologetic imitators like Tycho, with albums like 2006's Past is Prologue,  giving hungry fans a generous helping of that classic Boards of Canada sound. Tycho is the alias of San Francisco audiovisual artist Scott Hansen.  As Tycho, Hansen creates instrumental electronic soundscapes as impeccably as he do...

Kraftwerk Date:  April 4, 2014 Venue:  9:30 Club, Washington, DC I couldn't help but grin like an idiot as Afrika Bambaataa's 1982 electro/hip-hop anthem " Planet Rock " came on the system while I had a burger and beer at the bar adjacent to the 9:30 Club a couple weeks back, just moments before catching Kraftwerk's first live performance in DC in nine years.  Of course, the hook and beat of Bambaataa's classic are built on samples from Kraftwerk's 1977 track "Trans Europe Express" and "Numbers" from 1981, respectively.  Kraftwerk's indelible influence on popular music, especially post-punk and new wave, hip-hop, and electronic dance music, can't be overstated.   Kraftwerk (Ralf Hutter and Henning Schmitz) Kraftwerk formed in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1970 amidst that nascent "krautrock" scene with two classically trained music students at the helm - Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider.  This was the original o...