Released December 12, 2024, via Ninja Tune and Mom + Pop Records, the Where You Are EP is the most structurally unusual release in the Tycho discography. It is not a teaser, not a remix project, not a standalone creative statement — it is something the project had never attempted before: a return trip into a world that had already been publicly finished. Three and a half months after Infinite Health reached listeners, Scott Hansen walked back into the same creative space that had generated that album, gathered the rooms he had not included in the original floor plan, and offered them to the audience without ceremony or strategic scaffolding. Six tracks, a runtime that falls short of thirty minutes, one major vocal revelation, two previously unheard compositions, and a visual aesthetic that broke sharply from every prior chapter in the Tycho catalog. By the conventional metrics of the music industry, it was a modest release. By the standards of what it represented within the ongoing Tycho project, it was one of the most revealing documents Hansen had released in a decade.

Release Details

Field Detail
Title Where You Are
Artist Tycho (Scott Hansen)
Release Date December 12, 2024
Labels Ninja Tune (international) / Mom + Pop Records (US)
Catalog Number ZEN330 (Ninja Tune)
Total Tracks 6
Available Formats Digital streaming, Bandcamp download, vinyl (limited pressing)
Primary Producer Scott Hansen
Collaborator Cautious Clay (vocals on title track)

The EP was distributed simultaneously across major DSPs — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal — and made available for purchase at full quality through Bandcamp, consistent with the release infrastructure that had been in place for the Infinite Health album three months prior. The Ninja Tune catalog page was updated on December 12 with the same immediacy as the streaming drop, reflecting the label’s practiced execution of rapid release logistics. Broadway World, which covers the intersection of arts and live music, was among the first outlets to document the release, noting the return of Cautious Clay’s contribution in its fully voiced form.

The Moment It Arrived In

To read the Where You Are EP correctly, you have to place it inside the specific texture of the moment Hansen released it, which requires understanding what had happened in the preceding sixteen months.

In September 2023, Hansen had executed what the gear community referred to for months afterward as the Reverb purge: more than a hundred pieces of vintage studio hardware — synthesizers, processors, mixers, effects units — listed for sale on Reverb.com at a combined value exceeding $160,000. The inventory included instruments that had shaped the canonical Tycho sound across three albums: an Oberheim FVS-1 Four Voice synthesizer from 1975 that Hansen called “so unpredictable that it has a mind of its own,” an Eventide H3000 he had purchased after seeing a photograph of Eddie Van Halen next to one, a Sequential Prophet 5, a Moog Voyager, a Neve 54 Series broadcast console he believed had originally been used for South African radio, a Ursa Major Stargate 626 reverb, a Roland RE-201 Space Echo, an SSL G-Comp, and a Chandler Limited LTD-1 preamp — “one of my favourite preamps ever,” in his words. These were the instruments that built Dive, Awake, and Epoch. He sold nearly all of them.

What he kept: his Minimoog Model D (“No, absolutely not… I don’t care if I never use it again. It’s too sentimental”) and his Access Virus KC, the two pieces he considered essential and irreplaceable. Everything else went.

The philosophical shift that sale externalised was already producing music. In July 2023, “Time to Run” had arrived — the first new original Tycho composition in roughly two years, produced in the lean, software-centric setup that the gear purge had cleared space for, mixed by Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear in what would prove to be a crucial new creative partnership. In October 2023, “Small Sanctuary” followed, debuted at Hansen’s traditional Burning Man sunrise set before its official release on October 31. These two singles, both instrumental, both built from the rhythm-first methodology that Infinite Health would fully commit to, functioned as proof-of-concept tests for the new studio approach. They passed.

Infinite Health was announced on June 4, 2024, alongside the lead single “Phantom” — an animated music video produced by Ricardo B. Ponce (known professionally as Pixel Flux), directed by Hansen himself, with a neon-lit, iridescent visual style that signaled something aesthetically different from what had preceded it. A double single release of “Devices” and “Green” arrived in July 2024. The album itself dropped August 30, 2024, on Mom + Pop in the US and Ninja Tune internationally, in multiple physical formats: black 140-gram vinyl (catalog number ZEN308), white 140-gram vinyl for the Mom + Pop US pressing (MP769), a sky-blue 140-gram indie-exclusive limited edition (ZEN308N), CD variants, cassette (UPC 0810090095400), and digital.

The album was co-produced by Hansen, Zac Brown, and Chris Taylor, with Taylor and Harry Cox handling mixing and Joe LaPorta mastering. Fran Rodriguez, a Spanish artist who had built his collage practice over twenty years using personal photographs from northern Spain, contributed the cover image — a collaboration that drew on AI-generated landscapes trained on Rodriguez’s own photographic library, then composited using traditional digital methods, which sparked considerable debate on the r/tycho community before Hansen explained the process. Cover layout and design remained Hansen’s domain.

Infinite Health charted at number 12 on the US Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart. It peaked at number 27 on the UK Album Downloads chart and number 36 on the UK Independent Albums chart. It earned a Metacritic aggregate of 72/100 based on four critical reviews: Higher Plain Music gave it a 9.0/10, describing it as “perfect pick-me-up for fans of electronic music with guitar bone marrow in its frame”; Exclaim! gave it 8/10 and called it “melodic medicine”; Clash Magazine gave it 7/10 and called it “a sharply-constructed dose of sun-flecked electronica”; The Line of Best Fit gave it 6/10 and described it as “a paradox of consistency.” Pitchfork was silent.

The North American tour launched September 13, 2024, in Ogden, Utah, and ran through November 16 in Minneapolis. The live band — Hansen on synthesizers, guitar, and visuals; Zac Brown on bass and guitar; Billy Kim on bass, keyboards, synthesizers, and visuals; Rory O’Connor on drums and percussion — played rooms including the Showbox SoDo in Seattle, Mission Ballroom in Denver, White Oak Downstairs in Houston, Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville, The Salt Shed in Chicago, and History in Toronto. Support came from Brijean, the Los Angeles-based duo of Brijean Murphy and Doug Stuart. Average ticket price was $57.33 general admission; the most affordable market in the routing was Ogden, Utah, at a $12 median. Sold-out status was confirmed in San Francisco, Denver, and several other major dates.

It was into this particular moment — while the tour was still running, while critics were filing their last responses, while the Infinite Health album tracks were still accumulating daily streams — that the Where You Are EP arrived on December 12, 2024.

Track Listing and Running Order

# Title Notes
1 Infinite Health (feat. Cautious Clay) Full vocal version; unreleased in this form until EP date
2 To Everywhere Pt. 1 New instrumental composition
3 To Everywhere Pt. 2 New instrumental composition
4 DX Odyssey Originally appeared on Infinite Health album
5 Infinite Health (feat. Cautious Clay) — Extended Edit Extended version of the full vocal take
6 Epilogue Originally appeared on Infinite Health album

The sequencing is deliberate and rewards attention as a curatorial act rather than a playlist convenience. The EP opens with the item that justified its existence — the full vocal “Infinite Health” — then immediately turns away from vocal material into the EP’s most genuinely new territory: the “To Everywhere” suite. “DX Odyssey” serves as a bridge back to the Infinite Health album world, grounding the EP’s newer additions in the established sonic context. The extended edit of “Infinite Health” deepens the territory opened by track one. And “Epilogue” closes the EP with exactly the same piece that had closed the album, ensuring that the final impression is one of completion rather than departure.

This sequencing is not accidental. Hansen, who has treated sequencing as a compositional act across every Tycho release, was making a structural argument: the EP extends the Infinite Health world rather than launching a new one, and the repetition of “Epilogue” at both endpoints underscores that continuity. The house has been extended, but the same door leads out.

The Centerpiece: “Infinite Health” (feat. Cautious Clay) — Full Vocal Version

The most significant addition to the Tycho catalog on this EP is a track that already existed on Infinite Health — heard now in the form Hansen had deliberately withheld from the album.

The backstory requires understanding how the Infinite Health collaboration with Cautious Clay came together. Hansen had been working on the title track — which already bore the working title “Infinite Health” — and sent the instrumental to Brooklyn-based artist Joshua Karpeh, who records as Cautious Clay and whose own output navigates the space between R&B, soul, jazz-influenced composition, and left-field electronic texture. The title of the instrumental, which Hansen had settled on before any vocal was conceived, functioned as an inspiration prompt. As Cautious Clay explained in press materials: “I wrote this song about a mix of meditation, breath work and psilocybin and the positive effects these can have on health. When Scott sent me this instrumental, it had been titled ‘Infinite Health’ so that’s what helped inspire the lyrics.”

The lyrics Cautious Clay wrote engaged with his own practice around psychedelic wellness, breathwork, and meditation — a framework of healing that aligned closely with the album’s philosophical core, which Hansen had described as “a mantra for spiritual, emotional, and physical healing.” What Cautious Clay delivered back was a complete song, with its own structure, its own lyrical progression, its own emotional arc.

Hansen’s decision was to use it in two different ways. On the album, Cautious Clay’s vocals were embedded in the mix — “hushed, delicate vocals act as another instrumental layer,” as the album’s press materials put it — functioning as additional synthesizer texture rather than lyrical foreground. This decision was compositionally correct for the album: Infinite Health is a 33-minute instrumental record by philosophical design, and converting the title track into a conventional song with a lyrical front would have disrupted the architecture that every other track on the album was built to support. The vocal was present, but it was in service of the production rather than commanding it.

The EP gave the second version its proper home. Heard in full, with Cautious Clay’s voice positioned in the mix as a genuine lead rather than as ambient texture, “Infinite Health” reveals itself as a fundamentally different listening experience from its album counterpart. Hansen’s production does not recede when the voice arrives — the synthesizer architecture holds its ground with the same density and intention it had on the album — but the relationship between foreground and background shifts decisively. The synthesizers frame and support the vocal rather than surrounding and absorbing it. The lyrical content, which on the album version was audible but not decipherable as a primary element, becomes legible and intentional: a meditation on health as practice, not destination, delivered over a bed of precisely constructed electronic warmth.

This two-version strategy — one for the album, one for the EP — reflects a sophistication about the function of vocal material in an instrumental project that Hansen had been developing since the Weather era. Releasing Weather in 2019 with a vocal version and a simultaneous instrumental companion (Simulcast, released February 28, 2020) had been an earlier version of the same instinct: the human voice changes what music is, and the change requires careful contextual management. By 2024, Hansen had developed a more refined approach: rather than releasing two complete albums, he embedded the vocal at a low level in the album context, then released the full version in an EP context that gave it appropriate frame. The voice arrived in its own room rather than trying to rearrange someone else’s.

Fan response to the full vocal version was notably warmer than the initial reception of Weather’s vocal tracks had been in 2019. Part of this was familiarity: the album version of “Infinite Health” had already acclimatized the audience to Clay’s presence in the production. Part of it was the different structural relationship between Clay’s contribution and Hansen’s architecture — where Saint Sinner had been the center of Weather’s songs, Clay operated within Hansen’s production world rather than redirecting it. And part of it was the EP format itself, which invited the vocal version as an explicit creative choice rather than the album’s vocal tracks, which had felt to some listeners like a departure from a previously established contract.

“To Everywhere Pt. 1” and “To Everywhere Pt. 2”

The most significant contribution the Where You Are EP makes to the extended Tycho catalog — not the most anticipated, but the most genuinely new — is the two-part “To Everywhere” suite. These are not alternate versions of existing material, not extended edits, not remixes. They are original compositions that did not appear on Infinite Health, made during the same creative period that produced the album, and they represent the clearest window available into where the Infinite Health methodology was going before the album was completed and the door closed.

The fact that they were withheld from the album requires a compositional explanation, and Hansen has supplied one implicitly in his comments about the album’s deliberate concision. Infinite Health was 33 minutes and 14 seconds — lean to the point of discipline, in an era when streaming had largely decoupled album length from any practical consideration. The tightness was a statement: this is exactly what needed to be said, in exactly the runtime it required. No filler, no padding, no running time inflated to justify a price point. If the “To Everywhere” compositions didn’t appear on the album, it was not because they were lesser work but because the album already had its shape.

What the two-part structure allows that the album’s individual tracks could not is a compositional arc that develops across two movements. Part 1 functions as an arrival — the rhythmic foundation from the Infinite Health methodology, built from the same lean, rhythm-first approach that Hansen had described to 303 Magazine as building “from the ground up starting with drums,” with melodic material unfolding gradually over the established percussive base. The production palette is consistent with the album: the Minimoog’s bass character (the one synth Hansen refused to sell), the more precise digital timbres of the Virus KC, the Soundtoys processing chain that Hansen had identified as central to his studio approach. The REAPER-based DAW workflow that Hansen had credited with enabling the completion of Dive in 2011, and that remained the production center of Infinite Health, is audible in the way the layering accumulates — non-destructive, iterative, built in overlapping passes rather than horizontal sections.

Part 2 extends the vocabulary. The “To Everywhere” title is not incidental — it describes direction without determined destination, movement without a specific endpoint that has already been named. For an artist who had described Infinite Health’s theme as “being present and not being concerned with what’s coming down the road,” a suite named “To Everywhere” carries obvious philosophical weight: the act of going, in itself, as value — not the act of arriving somewhere.

For the section of the fan community most invested in Hansen’s purely instrumental output — listeners who had greeted Weather with ambivalence and Infinite Health with relief — the “To Everywhere” compositions provided what the album’s tight format could not fully accommodate: extended, expansive instrumental work with room to develop and breathe across a longer arc. Fan commentary in the immediate days after the EP’s release focused on these tracks as pointing somewhere beyond Infinite Health’s already-established vocabulary, suggesting harmonic and structural trajectories that a future album might pursue.

“DX Odyssey” — In Its EP Context

The inclusion of “DX Odyssey” from Infinite Health is not padding. It is curation.

The title almost certainly references Yamaha’s DX series FM synthesizers — the DX7 in particular, whose digital FM synthesis defined large portions of popular music production in the 1980s and which Hansen, with his documented affinity for period-specific electronic texture, would regard as a historically significant tonal source. “DX Odyssey” on the album was a groove-based, economically structured piece described by Higher Plain Music as blending “90s [production] with 70s funk influences,” with bass guitar grooves, cascading arpeggiators, and an oblique pastoral quality achieved through what reviewers noted as “bird song effects.” It was one of the album’s most rhythmically satisfying moments, and Clash Magazine’s Tom Morgan noted the bass-driven composition’s “subtle synth flourishes” with approval.

On the EP, its function shifts. Placed between the “To Everywhere” suite and the extended edit of “Infinite Health,” it serves as a connective tissue — a way of maintaining the sonic continuity between the EP’s newer additions and the Infinite Health world they extend. Its presence is a reminder that this is not a departure from that world but an extension of it. The EP could have included a different album track — “Green,” perhaps, or “Phantom” — but “DX Odyssey“‘s groove-forward character and its relatively modest compositional footprint make it the better bridge, allowing the extended edit of “Infinite Health” to arrive without competition.

“Infinite Health” (feat. Cautious Clay) — Extended Edit

The extended edit of the title track performs the specific function that this format, in serious electronic music, has always been capable of performing at its best: it discovers material in the composition’s ambient and textural margins that the standard edit necessarily passes over.

The standard edit of the full vocal version runs at a length appropriate for radio and streaming editorial contexts. The extended edit accepts no such constraint. Hansen’s synthesizer architecture — the layered pads, the careful use of reverb as a harmonic tool (a technique he had described to multiple interviewers as central to his sound: using reverbs and delays to let overlapping notes build into something larger than any single chord part), the Soundtoys EchoBoy delay that he used in a “Memory Man” style to create echo and reverb that he considered “part of the instrument itself” — all of this has room to develop and decay on its own terms. The Softube Model 84, which Hansen had identified as his Juno emulation of choice (“ahead of everybody else’s,” in his own characterization) and which drove the polyphonic synthesis work across the album, gets more space in the extended edit to demonstrate the specific warmth and character that drew Hansen to it.

The extended format also serves the philosophical register of the material. Cautious Clay’s lyrics addressed meditation, breathwork, and psilocybin as practices of sustained attention — disciplines that require and reward time. An experience structured around presence benefits from a temporal architecture that resists compression. The extended edit enacts, in its running time, the practice it describes.

“Epilogue” — The Closing Gesture

That the EP ends with the same piece that ended the album — the brief, quietly contemplative “Epilogue” — is the most deliberate structural decision in the EP’s construction, and it rewards attention accordingly.

On Infinite Health, “Epilogue” arrived after eight tracks of rhythmic propulsion and melodic development, earning its stillness through contrast. Its 1:54 runtime functioned as a postscript, an after-word — the material that comes after the story has concluded, deliberately open and unresolved. The Indy Review noted that it seemed to call back to Past Is Prologue, Hansen’s debut album from 2006, and suggested it signaled “future direction,” which is a way of saying that it felt oriented forward even in its quietness.

On the EP, placed at the conclusion of six tracks that have included a major vocal revelation, two new compositions, and an extended meditation, “Epilogue” does something more complex. It closes not just the EP but the entire creative period marked by Infinite Health — the album and its companion considered as a single extended statement. The repetition of “Epilogue” across both releases is a signal: this is the same door, whether you entered through the album or the EP, and it closes gently behind you both times.

There is something almost architectural about this choice, consistent with Hansen’s long-held view of music as built environment. He has described the experience of listening to Tycho as inhabiting a space rather than processing a sequence of sounds — an experience of place rather than event. “Epilogue” is where the door to this particular space closes. Its appearance at both endpoints ensures that the listener who arrived through the album and continued into the EP finds themselves in the same exit corridor, under the same light.

Production Infrastructure: The Post-Purge Studio

The Where You Are EP was produced in the same studio environment that had generated Infinite Health — which is to say, the lean, software-centric setup that the 2023 Reverb sale had cleared the way for. Understanding the EP’s production requires understanding what that environment actually contained.

The foundation was REAPER, the digital audio workstation that Hansen had switched to from Cakewalk Sonar during the intensive production phase of Dive in 2011. The switch was, as he described it, the functional catalyst that enabled the completion of that album — REAPER’s flexibility, its non-destructive processing model, and its routing depth matched how Hansen thought about sound. He had been using it as his primary production environment for every subsequent release, and Infinite Health had deepened his commitment to working primarily within it rather than routing extensively through hardware.

The two synths he had retained from the Reverb purge — the Minimoog Model D and the Access Virus KC — formed the hardware core of the palette. The Minimoog provided the rich, touch-sensitive bass and lead tones that appear prominently across Infinite Health’s rhythm-forward tracks; Hansen has noted that on “Devices” in particular, the Minimoog drove the “signature rich, soul-piercing leads.” The Virus KC, a digital virtual-analog synthesizer from Access Music, provided the atmospheric pads, complex digital soundscapes, and arpeggiated spaces that fill the album’s textural architecture. Hansen has described using “the dark, dark-timed reverb found in the Virus synthesizer to create arpeggiated spaces that inspire my melodic directions” — treating the instrument as both a synthesis engine and a spatial generator.

Software synthesis filled the gaps. The Softube Model 84 Juno emulation drove the polyphonic work, with Hansen emphasizing it as “ahead of everybody else’s” in accuracy and character. The u-he Zebra2 contributed specific synth leads. Processing relied heavily on the Soundtoys plugin suite — EchoBoy in “Memory Man” style for delay, alongside other Soundtoys effects that Hansen treats as instruments rather than effects, building color and character into tracks rather than merely finishing them.

For guitar and bass, Hansen relied on the Origin Effects RevivalDRIVE and BASSRIG pedals as his front-end, running signal through them to achieve consistent tube-amp saturation and tonal character across different recording contexts without the variability of large speaker cabinets and microphone placement. This approach — described in an Artist Interview on the Origin Effects website — was particularly valuable for an artist whose recording sessions, by 2024, were conducted in compressed time windows between family responsibilities rather than extended late-night marathons.

The live rig, which informed the production aesthetic for the touring cycle that surrounded both releases, added the Akai MPK25 and Key 37 MIDI controllers for sample triggering and DAW interaction, and the Moog Messenger for writing and live performance. The Apollo/UAD-2 Live Rack served as the processing backbone for live shows, allowing every instrument to run through studio-quality plugins with near-zero latency — effectively turning the processing chain itself into an instrument. The Bogner Duende head, modified to fit a 19-inch rack space, handled live guitar processing.

This was a fundamentally different setup from the hardware-intensive environment that had produced Dive, Awake, and Epoch. The warmth and saturation that Hansen associated with the 1970s and 1980s console sound he was pursuing — “a big console sound from the 70s and 80s,” as he had described his target aesthetic — was now achieved primarily in software, with the Soundtoys chain doing the work that the Neve 54 Series mixer and Chandler LTD-1 preamp had once done in hardware. The results were close enough to convince him: “You don’t need every sound to be magical and have all that character,” he told MusicTech in 2025. “The most basic DAWs have enough tools in them to be able to make, like, 90 per cent of all music ever created.”

Visual Identity: The Neon-Noir Turn

The most dramatically shifted element of the Where You Are EP relative to every prior Tycho release is its visual language, and this shift demands serious attention because visual identity has always been inseparable from the music’s meaning in Hansen’s project.

The ISO50 visual philosophy — the design practice that Hansen has operated alongside his music since the early 2000s — had developed through several distinct eras. The early period was warm, organic, and landscape-driven: desert photography, California coastal imagery, the golden hour light of the American West processed through collage techniques and geometric overlays. The Dive and Awake covers worked in photographic layering with sand, rock, water, and sky as primary material. Epoch introduced a harder-edged geometric abstraction, the trapezoid symbol that became the era’s primary visual signature, rendered in austere blues and silvers. Weather brought an unprecedented shift toward human presence — photographic portraiture, the intimate visual language of faces and bodies rather than landscapes and symbols. Infinite Health, with Rodriguez’s AI-composited northern Spanish landscapes, moved back toward the organic and photographic but with an iridescent, layered quality that Higher Plain Music called “psychedelic nostalgia.”

The typographic foundation throughout had remained consistent: Trade Gothic Bold Extended as the primary Tycho logotype, Clonoid Semibold for album titles and promotional headings, Neue Helvetica Medium for supporting metadata. These fonts anchored the visual identity across aesthetic pivots.

Where You Are broke from the established visual register more sharply than any prior release. Hansen described the direction as “neon-noir” with pronounced 1980s influences, specifically citing an Italo Disco aesthetic — the European electronic popular music of the late 1970s and early 1980s, defined by synthesizer-driven production, cooler color palettes, and a night-world sensibility quite different from California coast at sunset. The warm earth tones, the horizon lines, the organic landscape photography that had been the visual vocabulary of the project since 2002 gave way to something cooler, more synthetic, and explicitly nocturnal.

The shift was not arbitrary. It traced the music it accompanied. The full vocal version of “Infinite Health,” Clay’s contribution framing the track’s production architecture in a way the album had deliberately suppressed, inhabited a slightly more enclosed, interior emotional register than the wide-open instrumental landscapes of Dive or Awake. The “To Everywhere” compositions, pointing toward a future direction not yet fully named, suggested a different imaginary space than the one Hansen had been building in for twenty-plus years. And “Phantom” — the Infinite Health single whose animated video by Pixel Flux had been the first public signal of the neon aesthetic, with its iridescent, club-lit visual language — had already opened the door to this territory months before the EP arrived.

The Italo Disco reference is more than aesthetic shorthand. That genre — produced primarily between 1977 and 1985, with Giorgio Moroder’s Munich studio as its production center, artists including Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder himself, Cerrone, and dozens of Italian producers and performers — was characterized by its synthesis of American disco’s rhythmic foundation with European electronic precision, its embrace of the synthetic over the organic, and its unabashed nightlife orientation. It is the genre of late nights in enclosed spaces, of artificial light replacing natural light, of the urban and interior replacing the rural and exterior. For a project that had spent two decades making music about open spaces — coastlines, deserts, mountains, sunrise — the move toward this territory was the most significant philosophical pivot in the visual history of ISO50.

The December 2024 release date has its own contextual logic in this regard: in winter, at the darkest point of the year, natural light becomes scarce and artificial light takes over. The neon-noir aesthetic of Where You Are arrived at the moment when that experience was most immediate for listeners in the Northern Hemisphere.

The ISO50 blog, which during its 2008-2015 period of maximum activity had provided extraordinary transparency into Hansen’s visual decision-making — walk-throughs of layer constructions, color theory discussions, typographic reasoning — had by 2024-2025 largely migrated to Instagram, where the format favors images over explanatory text. The depth of documentation available for the Where You Are visual choices is therefore thinner than what exists for earlier eras. The critical analysis must rely more directly on the work itself and its relationship to the project’s visual history, with less of Hansen’s own explanatory prose to anchor interpretation.

The Release Strategy: Silence as Method

The Where You Are EP employed what had become Hansen’s preferred release approach for supplementary material: minimal pre-announcement, near-simultaneous reveal and drop, the work itself as the primary communicative vehicle.

The EP was announced and released in close proximity — not with the months-long campaign of pre-save requests and strategic single drops that had accompanied Infinite Health (where “Phantom” had been announced June 4, 2024, with the album following August 30). The announcement mechanism was the release itself: the EP appeared on December 12, the full vocal version of “Infinite Health” was the announcement vehicle, and the audience’s encounter with the music was the event.

This was consistent with what Hansen had described, across multiple interviews, as his preference for direct connection with listeners rather than engineered hype. “I just want to directly connect with fans, know who they are, and give them access to things as a thank you,” he told MusicTech in a 2025 interview conducted around the Infinite Health promotional cycle. The surprise release model enacts this preference structurally: rather than building anticipation for months, the work simply arrives, fully formed, and the audience engages with it on its own terms rather than through an accumulated layer of promotional context.

The approach also reflected the EP’s nature as an extension rather than a new beginning. A full album requires a full campaign because it introduces new themes, new visual frameworks, new symbolic vocabulary — context that needs to be established in advance. An EP that expands an existing album’s world requires none of that. The context already exists. The audience already understands the sonic and thematic territory. The most appropriate way to deliver an addendum is quietly, the way you might add a chapter to a book that’s already in the reader’s hands.

Northern Transmissions provided one of the most thorough early media responses to the EP, offering a detailed breakdown that treated the release as a genuine creative document rather than a promotional afterthought. Independent music blogs and electronic-focused digital media picked up the release consistently. The coverage accurately reflected the EP’s nature: an extension of an established conversation rather than the launch of a new one, valued for what it revealed about the creative period it concluded.

Live Context: The EP in the Touring Cycle

By the time the Where You Are EP was released in December 2024, the North American leg of the Infinite Health tour had concluded — the final North American date had been November 16, 2024, in Minneapolis. The EP’s material would therefore have reached the live context, to whatever extent it did, in the European and UK dates that followed in spring 2025.

The European leg, running fifteen cities across twenty-two days in March 2025, opened at London’s KOKO on March 6, then moved through Oslo’s Vulkan Arena on March 10, Stockholm’s Nalen on March 11, Copenhagen’s Pumpehuset on March 13, Berlin’s Huxley’s on March 14, Warsaw’s Palladium on March 16, Prague’s Roxy on March 17, Budapest’s Durer Kert on March 18, Milan’s Magazzini Generali on March 20, Paris’s Trabendo on March 22, Gent’s Wintercircus on March 23, Amsterdam’s Melkweg on March 24, Barcelona’s Sala Apolo on March 26, Madrid’s Sala But on March 27, and Lisbon’s LAV on March 28. The Tycho Open Source Community had received early pre-sale access on September 18, 2024; general sales had opened September 20.

The London KOKO show attracted commentary on the historic venue’s vertical architecture — multiple tiers allowing fans to view the ISO50 visual projections from different angles — alongside the practical frustration of significant wait time between support act and headliner. The support at KOKO was Tonic Walter, whose set was described in fan reports as providing high-energy contrast to Hansen’s more expansive headlining work. The performance itself was described as “stunning,” with the band sounding “tight” across material from all major eras.

The 2025 touring year extended into Japan in late January — Osaka’s Billboard Live Osaka on January 30, and Tokyo’s Spotify O-EAST on January 31, promoted by SMASH and priced at approximately ¥9,300 — and into Mexico in May, including a two-set appearance at the Viva El Gonzo festival in San José del Cabo (headlining the Crania stage on May 8 at 8:00 PM, then a late-night set at 12:15 AM on May 9) alongside The War On Drugs and Goose, followed by a headline show at Foro Indie Rocks! in Mexico City on May 11. The Mexico City setlist was widely considered among the definitional performances of the Infinite Health tour cycle, running fifteen tracks including “Phantom,” “Spectre,” “Hours,” “Weather,” “Consciousness Felt,” “A Walk,” “Green,” “PBS,” “L,” “Horizon,” “Devices,” “Time to Run,” and “Totem,” with “Awake,” “Apogee,” and “Division” as encores.

The live show itself had evolved into what Hansen described as a “cohesive statement” that bookended the project’s history: the ISO50 visual production synchronized to the DAW, massive LED screens displaying song-specific narratives including references to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain during darker set moments, a center-stage disco ball that emerged for “Green” and cast shimmering reflections across the room, theatrical lighting that moved through crimson for Epoch material and blue-violet for “Phantom.” The technical backbone was the Apollo/UAD-2 Live Rack, which processed every instrument in real time through studio-quality UAD plugins. The onstage synthesis was divided between Hansen’s Minimoog and Virus TI, Brown’s guitar work (including notes that audiences repeatedly expressed surprise to learn were guitar-generated rather than keyboard), Kim’s bass and synthesizer contributions, and O’Connor’s live drums — a four-piece ensemble whose integration of electronic programming with kinetic human performance remained the model established during the Dive era.

Fan reports noted specific live moments from across the 2025 dates: at The Midway in San Francisco, the band had to restart the introductory sequence of “Phantom” twice, which the room received not as a malfunction but as a demonstration of live complexity and commitment to technical precision. At The Salt Shed in Chicago, the “chatty” audience atmosphere created friction with the music’s immersive character — a tension between the studio-listening context in which Tycho material is often experienced and the social reality of large-room concert attendance. At Channel 24 in Sacramento, described by fan reports as “one of the best shows of the tour,” the crowd’s energy and the hometown resonance of Hansen’s Sacramento roots produced a particularly high-stakes night.

The EP in the Tycho EP Lineage

The Where You Are EP is the third major EP-format release in the Tycho catalog — after Coastal Brake (2009) and Awake Remixes (2016) — and its position in that sequence illuminates what EP releases have meant across the project’s history.

Coastal Brake arrived in October 2009 as the final signal before Dive, a crystallization of the sound that album would complete. Released on Ghostly International in a limited vinyl pressing of approximately 1,000 hand-signed copies — with the first 50 selling in under two hours, documented in real time on the ISO50 blog — it was simultaneously a music release and a community-building event. The EP’s function was prospective: it told the audience that something larger was coming. The four tracks — “Coastal Brake,” “Dictaphone,” “Ascension,” and a commissioned remix by Justin Van Der Volgen — were oriented toward the future.

Awake Remixes, released in 2016 on Ghostly International, was retrospective by definition: nine reinterpretations of Awake’s compositions by nine producers including Com Truise, Beacon, Bibio, and RJD2. Its function was connective, placing the Awake material in dialogue with the broader electronic music community and demonstrating compositional durability through the range of reinterpretations it could survive. The EP was oriented toward the past.

Where You Are is neither. It does not preview a future direction because it is not building anticipation for an upcoming album. It is not retrospective because it contains new original material rather than recontextualizing completed work. It represents a third category — the EP as honest addendum, the release that acknowledges creative continuity without pretending to launch anything new. Its relationship to Infinite Health is not the relationship of a trailer to a film or the relationship of a remix project to an album, but something closer to the relationship of an appendix to a book: additional material that genuinely belongs to the core work, offered after the main text has been read.

What this tells us about where Hansen was creatively in December 2024 is significant. The Infinite Health sessions had been generative enough to produce more than one album’s worth of material. The EP format gave the overflow a home without inflating the album or releasing the additional material as disconnected singles. This is the behavior of a creative practice that is working cleanly — producing more than it needs, making clean decisions about what goes where, and maintaining the coherence of each individual release while managing the larger flow of material with discipline.

Cautious Clay: The Collaboration in Context

The Where You Are EP’s relationship to Cautious Clay requires placing the collaboration in the context of the vocal partnerships that have defined Tycho’s mature period.

The introduction of Saint Sinner (Hannah Cottrell) on Weather in 2019 was the most dramatic vocal integration in the project’s history: a full album built around her voice, with every arrangement structured to support lyrical songwriting rather than purely instrumental development. The results were polarizing. For some listeners, the vocal presence was the evolution the project had been building toward. For others, it represented a departure from the thing they had valued most about Tycho — the purely instrumental character that had made the music useful in ways that vocal music could not be. The Metacritic score for Weather of 75/100 indicated critical approval; the fan community response was more divided.

Simulcast, released February 28, 2020, was the explicit acknowledgment that both positions deserved a release: the instrumental companion to Weather reproduced the same emotional arc without any lyrical content, and its reception by the vocal-skeptical segment of the audience was notably warmer than Weather had received from that same group.

The Cautious Clay collaboration on Infinite Health represented a more nuanced approach. By embedding the vocal in the album version at a level that functioned as textural rather than lyrical, Hansen got the benefit of the collaboration — the human voice as emotional catalyst — without converting the album into a vocal record. And by releasing the full vocal version separately on the EP, he gave the collaboration the full expression it deserved without compromising either the album’s instrumental coherence or the vocal version’s emotional legibility.

Cautious Clay’s musical identity — grounded in jazz theory, R&B production, and left-field electronic texture, developed through releases including Deadpan Love (2021) on Columbia Records — made him a particularly apt collaborator for Hansen at this moment. His approach to vocal performance tends toward the textural and melodic rather than the overtly emotive, which meant that even in the full vocal version, his contribution occupied a space between singing and sound design that the Infinite Health production architecture could accommodate. He was not fighting the synthesizers for control of the room; he was in conversation with them.

What the EP Tells Us About What Comes Next

The Where You Are EP is a transitional document, and like all transitional documents, it repays attention to what it leaves open as much as what it resolves.

The “To Everywhere” title is the most suggestive element: not “from everywhere” (a retrospective gesture) or “back to everywhere” (a nostalgic one) but “to everywhere” — direction without determined destination, movement as value in itself rather than as the means to a specific end. For an artist who had described Infinite Health’s philosophical core as being “present and not being concerned with what’s coming down the road,” the title of the EP’s most forward-looking material continues that philosophy: the direction matters; the specific destination does not need to be named in advance.

The neon-noir visual pivot suggests that the imaginary world of the next Tycho chapter may be more nocturnal and more synthetic than the open-air California landscapes of the project’s first two decades. Whether this is primarily aesthetic — a visual register shift without a corresponding thematic shift — or whether it implies different philosophical concerns, a different relationship to the natural world Hansen has consistently cited as a governing inspiration, is not yet determinable. The visual language, in the ISO50 practice, typically follows the music rather than preceding it. The music of the next full-length will clarify what the neon-noir language was pointing toward.

What can be said with confidence is that Hansen, at the time of the Where You Are EP’s release, was in a state of productive clarity rather than the exhaustion that might follow a cycle as demanding as the Infinite Health year. The gear purge had cleared the studio. The rhythm-first methodology had proven itself. The Chris Taylor partnership had added a collaborative voice that expanded what the production could do without overriding what made it distinctively Tycho. The touring cycle had demonstrated continued live strength. And the EP’s existence confirmed that the creative period had been generative enough to produce surplus material of genuine quality.

The platform that Where You Are closes and slightly extends — the Infinite Health era, with its philosophy of health as practice, presence as discipline, and the instrumental voice as primary language — is the most deliberately constructed creative statement Hansen has made in twenty-plus years of releasing music. The EP is its final word, delivered with the same quiet confidence that marked everything else about this particular creative phase. The next chapter will arrive when it is ready. In the meantime, this is where you are.

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Last updated: May 2026