The Question Tycho Never Had to Answer
For sixteen years, Scott Hansen never had to explain what his music meant. That was the point. Tycho’s instrumental records existed precisely to leave that question open — to offer textures and moods that listeners could project their own emotions onto, fill with their own memories, interpret without any authorial voice arriving to correct them. The music was a vessel, and the vessel had no captain. Then, in 2019, a voice appeared. And then in 2024, another. Two distinct collaborative relationships with two distinct vocalists, separated by a fundamental philosophical shift in how Hansen approached the very idea of singing in his music — these collaborations define what Tycho’s second and third eras became, and illuminate the creative tensions that have always sat at the heart of the project.
The first voice was Hannah Cottrell, known professionally as Saint Sinner, whose full presence across the Weather album represented the most dramatic departure in Tycho’s discography history. The second was Joshua Karpeh — Cautious Clay — whose contribution to the title track of Infinite Health was something more subtle, more carefully calibrated, and in some ways more philosophically coherent with what Tycho had always been doing. Understanding both collaborations requires understanding why Hansen pursued vocals at all, what that decision cost, what it yielded, and how he eventually arrived at a third path that honored both impulses at once.
Sixteen Years Without a Voice
Tycho’s relationship with vocals begins as an absence. From the project’s first substantial recordings in the early 2000s through the seminal Dive in 2011 and the band-oriented evolution of Awake (2014) and Epoch (2016), Hansen operated in a world of pure sound. His music conjured specific emotional states — nostalgia, longing, the particular quality of Northern California light — through synthesizers, guitars, drums, and the meticulous layering of textural elements, without a single word needing to be sung.
This was not a compromise or a limitation. Hansen was, by training and temperament, a visual artist first — he had spent fourteen years building the ISO50 design practice before music became his primary occupation — and he approached sonic composition with the same visual logic. Sounds were colors. Arrangements were compositions. The listener brought the story. A vocalist, Hansen understood instinctively, would change all of that. A voice in the mix is the most anthropocentric thing you can put in music. It announces the presence of a specific human being. It directs attention, assigns meaning, collapses ambiguity. For a producer who had spent his entire career cultivating productive ambiguity, that was a profound trade-off.
What changed, by the mid-2010s, was Hansen himself. The Tycho live band had grown from a solo laptop performance into a genuine ensemble, and the experience of playing alongside musicians — of watching audiences respond to the human kinetics of live performance — had shifted his thinking about what Tycho could be. The music was evolving from a solo act of composition into something that happened between people. The transition from bedroom producer to touring bandleader had opened a question that the studio recordings hadn’t yet addressed: where, in all of this evolving human complexity, was the voice?
Saint Sinner and the Weather Decision
The decision to add vocals to Tycho’s fifth album did not arrive fully formed. It was, by Hansen’s own account, a gradual realization that a specific piece of the project’s evolution had become necessary. His description of that moment is instructive: “There needed to be a voice and there needed to be some literal human kind of emotion put into the music that wasn’t up for interpretation as much as just these soundscapes.”
That phrase — “not up for interpretation” — marks the distance between Weather and everything that came before it. For sixteen years, interpretive openness had been Tycho’s primary gift to its audience. Now Hansen was saying that he wanted to close that openness down, at least partially, and replace it with something more specific, more directed, more human. The question then became: whose voice, and on what terms?
The meeting with Hannah Cottrell came through a mutual friend, and the chemistry was immediate. Their session together — approximately four hours, during which they completed two songs — had the productive efficiency of a truly well-matched collaboration. Cottrell’s voice is particular in ways that suited Tycho’s sonic world: delicate without being fragile, present without dominating, capable of sitting inside a dense instrumental texture rather than standing apart from it. She possessed a natural instinct for deploying vocals the way an instrumentalist would, as one element among many rather than as the primary attraction.
The process Hansen used for Weather established a template that would recur with modifications in his later vocal collaborations. He sent Cottrell a selection of instrumentals — at least a dozen — and asked her to respond to whichever ones moved her. This approach, deliberate and patient, placed the vocal contribution in a generative relationship with the existing music rather than a corrective one. The voice wasn’t fixing something the instruments couldn’t achieve; it was discovering what the instruments had been circling around. Significantly, the two tracks that Cottrell selected to develop were also among Hansen’s own favorites from the batch, suggesting a deep alignment of aesthetic instinct between them.
There was one notable exception to this process. The track “No Stress” was written specifically for Cottrell’s voice after Hansen had met her and understood what she was capable of — the only piece on Weather that originated with a vocalist already in mind, rather than finding its voice after the fact. This inversion of the usual process points toward something Hansen would explore more fully with Cautious Clay years later: the idea that a vocalist’s sensibility could be so well understood in advance that the music itself could be designed as a container for them.
Cottrell’s contributions to Weather were substantive in ways that went beyond pure performance. Her lyrical writing brought emotional specificity to material that had previously been expressly non-specific. The track “Pink & Blue” found her exploring her bisexuality with direct, unapologetic language — a level of personal disclosure that represented not just a departure for Tycho as a project, but a kind of trust between collaborators. Hansen, now in his mid-forties and building a family, was granting his music to a younger voice with her own story to tell. Weather was not Hansen’s autobiography filtered through a convenient singer. It was genuinely collaborative in the deepest sense: two distinct artistic perspectives occupying the same sonic space.
Weather was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards, eventually losing to The Chemical Brothers’ No Geography. The nomination confirmed that the vocal turn had expanded Tycho’s reach and profile. The album found its way to listeners who had never previously engaged with the project, drawn in by the familiarity and accessibility of Cottrell’s voice.
The Polarization and Its Aftermath
But the response was not uniformly enthusiastic. The fanbase that had grown with Tycho across sixteen years of purely instrumental music experienced Weather as a different kind of thing from what they had loved — and some found that difference unwelcome. The music they had used to process grief, to study, to accompany long drives and late nights, had previously been theirs in a particular way. The blank-canvas quality that made it so adaptable had been replaced by something that pointed in specific directions, told specific stories, left less room for projection. This is not a trivial loss for devotees of purely instrumental music, and Hansen knew it.
The response was to release Simulcast in early 2020. Framed as a companion to Weather rather than a corrective to it, Simulcast presented the same material stripped of Cottrell’s vocals and significantly reworked — not simply instrumental versions, but complete reconfigurations that stood on their own. Where Weather tracks had been built to accommodate a singing voice, the Simulcast equivalents found new structural approaches to the same harmonic and rhythmic material. Notably, Hansen enlisted his then-frequent collaborator Christopher Willits to contribute to the reworks, deepening the sonic texture that the removal of vocals had opened up.
Simulcast received a Pitchfork score of 5/10 — a number that carried particular sting, given that the influential publication had not reviewed Infinite Health at all upon its release four years later, suggesting a complicated and somewhat indifferent relationship between Tycho and that corner of critical culture. The Line of Best Fit and other outlets were more sympathetic, recognizing the structural intelligence of the project even while debating whether it was necessary. The real measure of its success was not critical but functional: Simulcast gave the segment of the fanbase that had been left cold by Weather a place to return to, while Weather continued to bring in new listeners who might never have discovered Tycho through its instrumental work.
The bifurcation of the Tycho audience into “vocals” and “no vocals” camps would have been a creatively paralyzing position for many artists. Hansen’s response was characteristically practical: when Tycho returned to touring and eventually to studio recording, the live operation and the studio operation would be allowed to answer the question differently. On stage, Cottrell remained a permanent fixture, her vocals providing the human focal point that audiences in a live setting require. In the studio, the question would be reopened from scratch with each project, approached on its own terms.
The Third Era and a Different Kind of Voice
When Hansen began work on what would become Infinite Health, the post-pandemic period had given him something he had rarely had in his career: time. Four years of domestic stability — starting a family, being present for his children’s early years, working without the pressure of impending tour cycles — fundamentally changed the conditions of composition. The album that emerged from that period was not a sequel to Weather’s vocal approach, nor was it a rejection of it. It was something more considered: a return to the electronic, beat-driven methodology of his earliest work, executed with the accumulated craft of everything that had followed.
The philosophical core of Infinite Health — the meditation on wellness, balance, the relationship between human beings and the machines they operate — was not content that required a vocalist’s sustained presence across an album. Hansen had arrived at a more specific, more bounded use for a human voice: not to define the album’s emotional center, but to crystallize its thesis at a single decisive moment.
The album’s title track became that moment. The instrumental foundation of “Infinite Health” was catalyzed not by Hansen or collaborator Zac Brown, but by Kaelin Ellis, a producer and drummer known for aggressive, hyperactive rhythmic programming. Ellis’s chopped-up, relentless drum breaks gave the track a kinetic character unlike anything else on the record — something hyperactive and almost overwhelming in its percussive density, which Hansen then built a shifting, psychedelic melodic framework around. The track was, in its instrumental form, the album’s most explicit departure from conventional Tycho structures. It was also clearly missing something.
What it was missing, Hansen determined, was a voice. But not just any voice: a very specific kind of voice, speaking about a very specific set of things.
Cautious Clay: Portrait of a Collaborator
Joshua Karpeh was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1993 and grew up with a musical environment shaped by his Liberian-Kru heritage and the American Midwest. He studied International Affairs at George Washington University, graduating in 2015, and spent several years in New York working in real estate and advertising before music claimed him fully. The professional pivot was facilitated in part by a growing facility with digital music production — he taught himself production techniques at university by remixing beats for friends — but Karpeh’s background as a multi-instrumentalist gave his music a depth that pure production skill alone could not supply. He plays saxophone, flute, guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums, and the fluency across those instruments shapes everything about how he writes and records.
He released his first significant single, “Cold War,” in 2017, and its trajectory illustrated the particular way that Karpeh’s music travels. “Cold War” accumulated listenership slowly and then suddenly — it crossed seventeen million Spotify plays and became influential enough that Taylor Swift interpolated its rhythm for “London Boy” on her Lover album, making Karpeh just the second artist ever to be interpolated on a Swift recording. John Mayer, who encountered Karpeh through social media, reached out and collaborated on “Swim Home” for the 13 Reasons Why soundtrack and “Carry Me Away” for Karpeh’s EP Table of Context. These connections positioned Cautious Clay as someone whose music traveled across genre and generational lines — someone whose R&B and indie-pop instincts had crossover fluency built in.
His debut full-length, Deadpan Love, appeared in 2021. His second album, Karpeh, released on Blue Note Records in 2023, represented the most explicit statement yet of his range: across fifteen tracks, he could be heard on vocals, flute, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, guitar, synthesizer, and bass, with collaborators including guitarist Julian Lage, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins. Blue Note — the label that had documented Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk — was not a casual association. Karpeh as a label was a declaration that Karpeh understood himself as working in a jazz lineage even when his production methods were thoroughly contemporary.
Crucially for the Tycho collaboration, the Karpeh album’s middle section was explicitly thematically dedicated to his experiences with psychedelics. Karpeh was not a vocalist who arrived at a studio session with no particular perspective on altered states and their relationship to health and creativity. He had made an entire album chapter about it. When Hansen sent him an instrumental track called “Infinite Health,” he was sending it to someone whose own creative work had already explored that precise territory.
The stylistic fit went deeper than lyrical content. Cautious Clay’s vocal approach — intimate, controlled, with a tendency to treat his voice as a textural instrument within a mix rather than as the dominant element above it — was directly compatible with Tycho’s sonic values. His production background meant he understood the architecture of Hansen’s instrumental tracks from the inside. He was not a pop singer parachuted into an electronic landscape; he was himself a producer and multi-instrumentalist who happened also to sing, and who would naturally understand what “Infinite Health” needed from a voice before he had written a single word for it.
The Making of “Infinite Health” (the Track)
The process Hansen used with Cautious Clay followed the basic principle he had established with Saint Sinner on Weather, but with a crucial modification: Hansen sent Karpeh the track with its working title already attached. “Infinite Health” was not a placeholder title to be replaced once the vocal direction became clear — it was a thematic brief, a creative prompt, a statement of what the music already was and what a voice was being invited to amplify.
This was a deliberate compositional choice. By labeling the instrumental with its intended emotional territory before passing it to Karpeh, Hansen created conditions in which the resulting vocal contribution could be precisely calibrated rather than interpretively open. He was not asking: what does this music mean to you? He was asking: here is what this music is about — now tell us more.
Karpeh’s response was to write about “a mix of meditation, breath work, and psilocybin and the positive effects these can have on health.” The specificity is notable. This was not a lyric about feeling good, or about nature, or about love, or about any of the ambient generalities that could plausibly accompany atmospheric electronic music. It was a lyric about practices — deliberate, embodied, sometimes pharmacological — that people use to maintain their psychological and physiological equilibrium against the pressures of contemporary life. In the context of an album explicitly conceived as therapeutic, as an auditory environment designed to support wellness and grounding, these lyrics functioned not as decoration but as thesis statement.
Hansen’s own framing of the thematic core — “To make the most positive impact on the people you love and the people that love you, you have to be the healthiest, strongest version of yourself and that includes both physical and emotional health” — found its perfect vocal articulation in Karpeh’s performance. The two men had arrived at the same place from different directions: Hansen through the post-pandemic experience of domestic life and the philosophical meditation on machine-human balance that undergirds the whole album; Karpeh through his own creative investigation of jazz heritage, psychedelic experience, and embodied self-knowledge.
The performance itself is precisely calibrated to the sonic environment. On the album version, Cautious Clay’s vocals are described as hushed and delicate — deployed more as an additional textural layer than as a conventional lead vocal demanding foreground attention. This placement is not incidental. Hansen, throughout his engagement with vocal collaborations, has consistently resisted the model in which a voice sits on top of the music and claims priority over it. On Weather, even Cottrell’s relatively prominent vocal presence was embedded in dense instrumental arrangements that always retained their own weight. On “Infinite Health,” the approach is taken further: the voice is present, it carries meaning, it speaks — but it does not dominate. It is one instrument among many, distinguished from the others by the fact that it articulates words.
This is, in a precise technical sense, the opposite of pop production convention, where the vocal is almost always the primary mix element and everything else exists to support it. Hansen’s approach suggests a fundamentally different theory of what a singing voice is for in music: not to carry the song, but to be carried by it, to add a specific kind of human presence to a texture that would otherwise remain purely abstract.
The “Vocal Edit” and the Where You Are EP
The album version of “Infinite Health” presented Cautious Clay’s contribution at the level of suggestion — present, meaningful, but not foregrounded. Hansen, however, recognized that the full vocal performance deserved its own context, and in December 2024, he released the Where You Are EP through Mom + Pop in the US and Ninja Tune internationally, organized around a more prominent vocal mix of the track.
The EP’s six-track sequence — “Infinite Health (feat. Cautious Clay),” “To Everywhere Pt. 1,” “To Everywhere Pt. 2,” “DX Odyssey,” “Infinite Health — Extended Edit,” and “Epilogue” — functions as a companion piece to Infinite Health in a way that directly echoes the relationship between Weather and Simulcast, but with inverted logic. Where Simulcast had stripped vocals away to give instrumental listeners a place to inhabit the same material, Where You Are brought a vocal forward that had been partially obscured on the album, giving the collaboration space to breathe in a different acoustic environment.
The Extended Edit of “Infinite Health” on the EP deepens this approach, giving the vocal performance more room and allowing the relationship between Clay’s voice and the track’s hyperactive drum programming to develop over a longer arc. The EP as a whole suggests that Hansen has become genuinely comfortable with the idea that his music can exist in multiple simultaneous states — with voice, without voice, with voice at different levels of the mix — and that these states are not contradictions of each other but facets of the same work.
What Changed Between Saint Sinner and Cautious Clay
To understand what Tycho learned from Weather and applied differently on Infinite Health, it is useful to examine the structural differences in how the two vocal collaborations were deployed.
Saint Sinner’s role on Weather was total: she appeared on every vocal track, wrote all the lyrics, provided the consistent human presence that unified the album’s emotional register. Weather was, explicitly, a vocalist’s album — not in the sense that the vocals were louder than the music, but in the sense that the album’s identity was inseparable from her voice. You could not describe Weather without describing what Cottrell brought to it. The album and the singer were co-constitutive.
Cautious Clay’s role on Infinite Health was singular and strategic: one track, one contribution, one crystallization of the album’s central theme. Where Cottrell’s presence had expanded the Tycho project into genuinely new territory — territory that was partly hers — Clay’s contribution was more precisely integrated with an existing conceptual framework. He arrived at the moment the album needed a human voice to articulate what the instrumental tracks had been circling around, said exactly what needed to be said, and the album moved on. His presence is decisive without being dominant.
This is not a diminishment of Karpeh’s contribution. The decision about how much space to give a vocal collaborator is itself an artistic one, and Hansen’s choice to use Clay’s voice as a carefully placed thematic anchor rather than a sustained presence reflects a more mature understanding of what vocal collaboration can mean for an instrumental project. Weather had asked: what happens if we fully commit to having a voice? Infinite Health asked: what happens if we deploy a voice precisely where it is most needed and nowhere else?
The answers to those two questions are different, and both are valid. But the second represents a more sophisticated integration of vocal collaboration into a project that had not been built around vocals and did not fundamentally need them in order to function — while still recognizing that, at a specific moment in the album, a human voice could say something no instrument could say alone.
The Live Dimension: How Vocals Work Outside the Studio
One of the most revealing aspects of Tycho’s vocal history is the gap between the studio recordings and the live performance context. While Infinite Health contained Cautious Clay’s voice on exactly one track, and Weather contained Saint Sinner’s voice across most of its running time, the live Tycho band has a more fluid relationship with vocals than either studio album suggests.
Cottrell — Saint Sinner — has remained a permanent touring member of the Tycho live band throughout and after the Infinite Health album cycle, performing alongside Hansen, Zac Brown, Rory O’Connor, and multi-instrumentalist Billy Kim. Her live presence provides something that the studio albums deliberately withhold: a consistent human focal point for an audience that needs one, a voice that can anchor attention during a performance in ways that pure instrumentation cannot always achieve in a venue. The decision to retain Cottrell in the live band while not featuring her on Infinite Health is not inconsistency — it reflects a clear-eyed assessment that the live and studio contexts have different requirements and that a voice can serve both without either one undermining the other.
There is also the question of how Cautious Clay’s contribution plays in a live setting. The “Infinite Health” track, with its hyperactive drum breaks and psychedelic melodic framework, translates powerfully to a live performance context, and the vocal edit — with its more prominent positioning of Clay’s contribution — has become part of the live Infinite Health Tour repertoire. The track’s position in the album sequence (fifth of nine, arriving just as the album’s kinetic energy peaks) makes it an effective live anchor point, the moment in the set when the rhythm is at its most intense and the thematic argument is at its most explicit.
The Broader Question of Vocals in Tycho’s Music
Taken together, the Saint Sinner collaboration and the Cautious Clay collaboration illuminate something fundamental about how Hansen thinks about the relationship between voice and music — and about where voices belong in instrumental work.
His approach across both collaborations has been consistently non-hierarchical: voices do not sit above the music and direct it; they enter into conversation with the instrumental elements and contribute to a shared result. This is not simply a mixing decision. It reflects a philosophy about what singing is, and what it is for. In the tradition that Tycho inhabits — a tradition with deep roots in electronic production, in post-rock, in ambient music — vocals have often been treated as foreign objects when they arrive, things to be used sparingly if at all, because their presence automatically changes the register of the listening experience. Hansen has worked against this binary in both directions: Weather demonstrated that a voice could be central to Tycho without overwriting the project’s identity, and Infinite Health demonstrated that a voice could be present at a single decisive moment without obligating the project to become a different kind of thing.
What remains constant across both experiments is the commitment to finding the right voice for the right moment, and then giving that voice material that genuinely needs what it has to offer. Cottrell’s lyrical directness and her willingness to write from her personal experience gave Weather an emotional specificity that no instrumental arrangement could have supplied. Karpeh’s particular combination of musical depth — the jazz training, the multi-instrumental fluency, the experience of making an entire album chapter about psychedelic self-exploration — made him the precise collaborator that “Infinite Health” required at the moment it was conceived.
Neither collaboration was accidental. Neither was obligatory. Both were, in Hansen’s characteristic phrase, grounded in the now — responsive to what the specific music needed at the specific moment of its creation, rather than driven by a pre-existing position on whether Tycho should have vocals at all.
Cautious Clay in the Wider Context of Tycho Collaborations
The Tycho project has always operated through collaborative relationships rather than in isolation, even during the years when Hansen was nominally a solo artist. Zac Brown’s contributions to the live band and then to studio recording — culminating in explicit co-writing and co-production credits on Infinite Health — represent the most sustained long-term creative partnership. Rory O’Connor’s transformation of the live show from a laptop-dependent performance into an improvisational human event was its own form of deep collaboration. Chris Taylor’s work as co-producer and mixing engineer on Infinite Health brought a sonic perspective shaped by years inside the Grizzly Bear studio process.
Within this ecosystem, vocal contributors occupy a particular position: they are the collaborators whose presence most visibly changes what Tycho sounds like from the outside, and thus the collaborators whose selection most directly expresses Hansen’s judgment about where the project should be. Cottrell’s selection for Weather expressed a desire for full vocal commitment, for an album that would not be describable as “Tycho with a guest singer” but as a genuinely different kind of Tycho — one in which the human voice was co-equal with the electronic architecture. Karpeh’s selection for Infinite Health expressed something different: a desire for a specific quality of human presence at a specific moment, delivered by someone whose whole artistic biography had been building toward exactly the set of themes the album needed to address.
That Clay’s primary public identity at the time of the collaboration combined R&B production fluency with the jazz depth of the Karpeh album was not incidental. The sonic range he inhabits — emotionally direct without being melodramatic, rhythmically sophisticated without being academic, comfortable with both electronic production environments and acoustic instrument layers — made him one of a small number of artists who could enter a Tycho track and not feel like a visitor. He was a collaborator whose native musical language already contained most of the vocabulary that Tycho was built on. What he added was the specific combination of lyrical content — the breathwork and the psilocybin and the explicit health advocacy — with a vocal delivery calibrated to be inside the music rather than above it.
The Where You Are EP extended this collaboration beyond the album and gave the relationship between Hansen and Karpeh a more developed public form. The EP demonstrated that the “Infinite Health” moment was not a one-off but a sustained creative conversation — one that Hansen valued enough to give additional space and additional formats.
What Cautious Clay Brought That Nothing Else Could
In the final analysis, the question of what Cautious Clay specifically contributed to Infinite Health — and why no other approach to that contribution would have served as well — comes down to three things operating simultaneously.
The first is thematic alignment. The Infinite Health album is explicitly about health — mental, physical, emotional, the kind that comes from deliberate practice rather than passive accumulation. Clay’s lyrics about breathwork and psilocybin did not arrive at this theme from the outside; they emerged from an artistic biography in which these exact themes had already been worked through in the Karpeh album’s “Honeymoon of Exploration” section. He was not a hired pen writing to specification. He was an artist who had already explored this territory and recognized himself in the invitation.
The second is sonic integration. Clay’s voice on “Infinite Health” behaves like an instrument, and he performs it with the sensibility of a producer who understands how voices function within dense electronic textures. The hushed, delicate quality of the performance — described by multiple reviewers and by Hansen himself — is not a limitation or a stylistic affectation but a precise technical response to the sonic environment. The track’s drum breaks are aggressive and hyperactive; a vocalist performing in a conventional pop-forward style would have created a competition for attention that would have resolved in favor of neither the voice nor the instruments. By treating his own voice as one textural element among many, Clay allowed both the percussion and the vocal to exist fully without either one sacrificing itself for the other.
The third is what the voice does to the album’s overall structure. Infinite Health is ninety-three percent instrumental. For thirty-three minutes, the music speaks without words, trusting texture and rhythm and melody to carry emotional weight without verbal assistance. Then, at track five, for three minutes and forty-one seconds, a human voice appears and says, in words that can be understood and remembered: this is what all of this is for. The health. The groundedness. The practice. The intention. And then the music continues, and the words recede, and the listener carries that declaration forward into the remaining four tracks like a key that the rest of the album was built to receive.
No instrumental passage, however eloquent, could have done exactly that. Cautious Clay’s contribution to Infinite Health is not an addition to the album’s meaning. It is the moment the album’s meaning becomes explicit — the hinge point between the music’s abstract therapeutic ambitions and the listener’s understanding of what those ambitions are and where they point. It is, in the most precise sense, the voice the album needed.
Looking Forward
Hansen has spoken of the Infinite Health era as the beginning of Tycho’s third chapter rather than a conclusion of anything. The Where You Are EP confirmed that the relationship with Cautious Clay was not exhausted by a single album track. The continued presence of Saint Sinner in the live band confirms that the vocal dimension of Tycho’s work — however carefully it is calibrated in the studio — remains a live and active creative element.
What the history of Tycho’s vocal collaborations suggests, taken in full, is that Hansen has arrived at a position of genuine flexibility: the ability to deploy voices when they are specifically needed, in precisely the quantities and configurations that serve the work, without committing in advance to any particular answer about whether Tycho is a vocal project or an instrumental one. It is both, at different moments, in different configurations, according to the requirements of each individual piece of music.
That flexibility, earned through the polarizing experience of Weather and the careful recalibration of Infinite Health, represents one of the more interesting creative positions in contemporary electronic music — and Cautious Clay’s contribution to the title track stands as one of its clearest demonstrations.