Tycho hopes the future and requiems the past at Royale on Monday, 11 November 2024.

Brijean’s got a whole lotta percussive accessories in the opening slot.

Additional photos by Daniel Nova, Jr.

It was a night for dressing well on Tremont Street. Not so much at the Tycho show, which was full of mostly middle-aged types, who take themselves to be fashionable in a kind of sedate bourgeois futurist mode, but who could hold a candle to the luminaries at the annual Boston Fashion Awards Show at the hotel next door?

Quick hit: a clubby electro version of that theme from My Dinner With Andre, Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1”, played on the house mix between sets…

Brijean performed as a two-piece, mixing live percussion and synth with layers and layers of electronic ambiance. If you didn’t know the act was based out of Los Angeles, you would have guessed it. There’s a New Agey lightness, a manicured hedonism, a multicultural vibrancy to their clubby take on world music. The instrumentation included entire galaxies of percussive accessories, including a triangle. Shout out to the triangle! Their latest album Macro is out now, available via Ghostly International.

Tycho, the ambient post rock outfit birthed out of the blessed skull of San Francisco-based musician-cum-producer Scott Hansen, toured through Boston on the wings of his latest LP Infinite Health.

The artist quote for the album, floating around in the PR mailer soup, reads as follows: “Infinite Health is about hope for the future and a requiem for the past."

You could run for President on that platform.

Tycho wasn’t much for stage banter on Monday night. You could say that about most electronic acts, which have never quite shaken off the mentality that they are, at bottom, robots without feeling and merely prosthetic extensions of the machines they presumably operate (or, are operated by). Where did electro outfits get this schtick? Probably from Kraftwerk. Though Oneohtrix Point Never did roll through Royale once with a few warm human words for the room. But Lopatin grew up in the area, so maybe there was a little hometown hero energy at work.

The live version of Tycho performed as a four-piece, and they were all business. Seriously, from the guitarist, to the backup synth player, to the drummer, the guys that Hansen recruited for the tour looked like they could record an album, play a live set, and pull a hit on a jailhouse snitch all in the same day. No messing around, no wasted fuckery.

Like most producer/musician combos, Hansen is a diabolical perfectionist when it comes to sound. There’s a kind of irrepressible joy to making music without taking on the burden of grokking it with a producer’s ear. And vice versa, grokking music with a producer’s ear without having to claim authorship for the underlying product. But a working musician with a producer’s ear must be like a plastic surgeon with body dysmorphia staring at themselves in the mirror, scalpel in hand.

Tycho’s music is beautiful in the way that a solitary violin playing the theme from your favorite opera through the inky black of a moonless night in a concentration camp is beautiful. The overall sense of brooding dread exerts a sublime effect, exquisite for some and torture for others.

Prediction: muscular soulless techno with spiritual or artistic pretensions will make solid gains in the Trump years as the middle class seeks to bury its collective head in apolitical sands with the hopes and the requiems of holding onto their houses, cars, and salaries while the country burns down around them, the poor are mauled, and the wealthy force us to roll around in their shit and call it shinola. Music like Com Truise, for example, which flexes a subversive antinomian subtext until you go to a live show and realize it’s music for coke-snorting, juicehead bosses whose kids hate them and hate themselves.

Let’s check back on that prediction in about three years.

Photo Gallery 1

Photos by Daniel Nova, Jr.

Photo Gallery 2

Photos by HDN Staff