Tycho
– ALBERT HALL, MANCHESTER –
Closed-eye hallucinations gift light where there is none. When blood-pressure drops and the visual field darkens, baptismal blackness paints stars across the ceiling of your skull – scars across the sky that surf the seam between reality and illusion. When we shut ourselves to the world, and begin to drift into the well of ourselves, sun-stroked abstraction leads a path to dilution. Flashes of blood-orange spill into endless canyons. Journeying nostalgia breaks into a slow-motion wave. Marbled un-reality speaks to a place where we don’t know what is past-life and what is dream, but do not want to. Housed in the adopted memory palace of Manchester’s Albert Hall, multi-dimensional artist Scott Hansen exercises his ability to remove under his better-known moniker of Tycho, and takes us to the strange paradise that waits at the end of such experiences. Here, you are no longer.
Converging musical and visual art, the Hansen-headed live outfit search labyrinthine with pulsing, meditative drive. Drummer Rory O’Connor provides the surgical back-bone to a decentralized evening, where the band make every effort to divert the attention from themselves and look to place it all on the centerpiece of the show: the screen. Searching projections scan vast landscapes – interspersed with visions of the ocean’s surface from beneath the waves. Flanked by a pulpit of synthesizers – tracing the history of the instrument, Hansen meets such imagery with a set that swims in the pool of his 15-year relationship with creating music of an imagined future – sonic fossils to be discovered in hyper-distance. The evening challenges and transcends the definition of ‘live-performance’.
‘Dive’ captures visceral gioai in-flight, while chroma-walker ‘Daydream’ acts as the light breaking through hands that shield eyes from the evening sun. The cerebral sensuality of Epoch-cut ‘Division’ offers a lucid shift, but instead of cutting through the thick atmosphere, it simply displays a different hue – a different way to blue. ‘A Walk’ stands as the flagstaff of Hansen’s world-of-tomorrow, and within its 5-minute length, separates the audience from time and mind. Oceanic yet astral, Hansen shares the after-glow of experiences you’re unsure to have lived – shimmer tricks, playing with the hours.
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Music Journalism student and lover of all things sensory and cosmic.
