How Scott Hansen navigated a pandemic, fatherhood, a massive gear purge, and a creative reset to arrive at the most grounded chapter of Tycho’s two-decade career.

Simulcast: The Bridge Back

On February 28, 2020, Scott Hansen released Simulcast through Mom + Pop and Ninja Tune. On paper it was a companion piece to his 2019 GRAMMY-nominated record Weather, but in practice it was something far more significant: a deliberate, unhurried return to the instrumental vocabulary that had defined Tycho for a decade and a half before Saint Sinner’s vocals arrived. What nobody could have predicted was that the album would land less than three weeks before stay-at-home orders reshaped American life, making its themes of open space, coastal light, and solitary movement feel almost prophetic.

Weather had been a pivot. For the first time, Hansen built an entire album around a vocalist, structuring songs with verses, choruses, and lyrical narratives. The experience taught him things he could not have learned any other way. “I learned more about instrumental music in making a vocal record than I had in all the years prior, making instrumentals,” he told KCRW ahead of the Simulcast release. The vocal framework forced him to think about space differently – where a voice sits, what supports it, what happens when you pull it away and let the architecture stand on its own.

Simulcast’s eight tracks mirror the Weather tracklist almost one-to-one. “Weather” maps to “Weather.” “For How Long” becomes “Alright.” “Skate” becomes “Outer Sunset.” “Pink & Blue” becomes “PCH.” “Japan” becomes “Cypress.” “No Stress” becomes “Stress.” But these are not karaoke versions with the vocal stem muted. Hansen went back into the sessions and recorded bespoke instrumental reworkings, reshaping arrangements so that synths and guitars filled the roles Saint Sinner’s voice had occupied. Subtle new drum patterns appear. Guitar and synth lines step forward. The results feel simultaneously familiar and independent – the same emotional DNA expressed through a different body.

For Hansen, the creative distinction was important. “That’s all Tycho is to me,” he explained to KCRW, “trying to translate the feeling you get when you’re in nature into music.” Simulcast was a reaffirmation of that mission after the vocal detour. It proved – to Hansen as much as to listeners – that the instrumental voice had not atrophied during the Weather sessions. If anything, it had been sharpened by the exercise of accommodation.

The album’s release-week reality was stark. A touring cycle that should have followed was immediately impossible. Within weeks, venues shuttered, festivals cancelled, and the live infrastructure that had sustained Tycho’s career since the Dive era went dark. Simulcast became an album experienced almost entirely in headphones, on walks, in apartments – contexts that, ironically, suited its contemplative character. But for Hansen, the timing meant something else entirely: an open, unstructured stretch of time with no shows to play and no deadline to meet. The pandemic pause was about to reshape everything.

The Pandemic Interregnum: Forced Reflection

For an artist who had spent the better part of a decade on a relentless cycle of writing, recording, touring, writing, recording, touring, the sudden stillness of 2020 was disorienting. Hansen had been moving at full speed since Dive broke through in 2011, with Awake in 2014, Epoch in 2016, the Weather/Simulcast double in 2019-2020, plus constant global touring. COVID imposed the first real pause he had experienced in his professional life.

“After Weather, COVID shut everything down,” Hansen told 303 Magazine in 2024, reflecting on the period. The shutdown “gave him the luxury of time, reflection, and consideration” – language that suggests Hansen came to see the pause not purely as a loss but as something he needed, even if he would not have chosen it.

That time allowed him to step back and think about sustainability – not just of a music career, but of a life. The pandemic years coincided with major personal shifts. Hansen became a father. Suddenly there were two small humans (a three-year-old and a one-year-old by the time Infinite Health arrived in 2024) who restructured every hour of his day. The open-ended studio sessions that had characterized his earlier work gave way to compressed windows: 8 AM to 5 PM while the kids were with a caretaker, then dinner, bedtime routines, and perhaps a couple more hours of work in the evening.

But fatherhood did something beyond compressing his schedule. It reoriented his sense of purpose. “Since having kids, you realise that you’re not the centre of the universe and there’s something more important than you,” he explained to MusicTech in a 2025 interview. The themes that would ultimately power Infinite Health – mortality, presence, the desire to be a stronger and healthier version of himself for the people who depended on him – all germinated during this period.

Health concerns became central. Hansen became acutely conscious of his physical well-being, not as vanity but as responsibility. At 47 by the time Infinite Health released, he was thinking about longevity in practical terms: being present for his children’s milestones, being capable of sustaining the physical demands of touring for another decade or more. The album title itself – Infinite Health – was not a boast but a mantra, a daily intention.

The pandemic also prompted reflection on technology and creative process. Hansen had spent twenty-five years collecting synthesizers and studio equipment, building a formidable hardware arsenal. The forced stillness gave him space to ask which of those tools actually served the music and which had become furniture – impressive objects that consumed space and maintenance time without meaningfully contributing to the work. That reckoning would eventually manifest in spectacular fashion on Reverb.com.

Singles in the Wilderness: 2020–2023

Between Simulcast and Infinite Health, Hansen released a sequence of singles and collaborations that, viewed in retrospect, trace a clear arc from the vocal-experiment period back toward instrumental foundations, with several important stops along the way.

“Run Away” with rum.gold (September 2020)

Seven months after Simulcast, Hansen released “Run Away” as a collaboration with R&B singer-songwriter rum.gold. Released via Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune on September 30, 2020, the track represented a notable first: Hansen’s first collaboration with a male vocalist. Where Weather had been built around Saint Sinner’s presence, “Run Away” paired Tycho’s detailed arrangements and crisp production with rum.gold’s soulful, emotionally direct vocal delivery. The single arrived with an acoustic version that stripped the electronic elements entirely, revealing the song’s bones. It was a pandemic-era release in the truest sense – conceived and completed remotely, released into a world where its creators could not perform it live.

“Only Love” with Benjamin Gibbard (July 2021)

The collaboration with Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service frontman Benjamin Gibbard arrived on July 13, 2021, and it marked perhaps the most unexpected pairing of Hansen’s career. The track started life as an instrumental, but something was incomplete. Hansen sent a rough demo to Gibbard, who recorded vocals over it. “The first time [Hansen] heard the rough vocals the whole song suddenly made sense and the arrangement flowed out of that,” according to the release materials.

The result was tender and uplifting, drawing on the melodic sensibilities both artists shared despite coming from very different traditions. “Only Love” proved durable enough to generate multiple versions throughout 2021: an LP Giobbi remix in November and a version featuring Brijean in December. More importantly, the Gibbard collaboration demonstrated that Hansen’s interest in vocals had not ended with Weather – he was simply being more selective, treating vocal features as specific creative choices rather than a wholesale shift in approach.

“Time to Run” (July 2023)

After a gap of roughly two years with no new original material, “Time to Run” arrived in July 2023 and immediately signaled a new chapter. It was Tycho’s first original composition since the Gibbard collaboration, released on Ninja Tune / Mom + Pop, and it came with two crucial developments.

First, the track was instrumental – a return to the wordless Tycho that had built the project’s identity. Second, it introduced a new creative partnership: Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear handled mixing duties, beginning a working relationship that would define the next phase of Hansen’s output.

The music video, directed by Patrick Elmore, drew directly from Hansen’s biography. It depicted a cross-country race, capturing the meditative power of running that Hansen had experienced as a young competitive runner. The video juxtaposed two visual approaches: structured, slow-motion footage of the competition itself, and handheld, naturalistic shots of the runner alone in the wilderness. The contrast mirrored the track’s own tension between propulsive rhythm and expansive atmosphere.

The track featured guitarist Zac Brown and drummer Kaelin Ellis, with Hansen embracing a rhythmic direction that felt more physically grounded than much of his earlier work. Running – the repetitive, meditative, endurance-driven act – was both the subject and the structural metaphor.

“Small Sanctuary” (October 2023)

Released on October 31, 2023, “Small Sanctuary” deepened the creative trajectory established by “Time to Run.” Once again, Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear was on mixing duties, further developing the partnership. The track premiered at Burning Man during Hansen’s traditional sunrise set – a context that speaks to its intended function as music for transition, for the liminal space between night and morning.

Musically, “Small Sanctuary” featured glowing pops of synth, a jagged guitar motif from longtime Tycho guitarist Zac Brown, and vivid, energetic beats. It was a track that felt like Tycho’s signature instrumental approach renewed rather than repeated – the same emotional palette applied with tools and techniques refined by years of experience and collaboration.

Hansen wrote the song for his daughter. That biographical detail, shared in press materials, underscored how completely fatherhood had become the lens through which he filtered his creative work. The abstract, landscape-driven imagery that had characterized earlier Tycho – sunsets, coastlines, fog – was giving way to something more intimate and personal, even as the music remained wordless.

Together, “Time to Run” and “Small Sanctuary” functioned as a public statement of intent. The vocal experiments were behind him (for now). The instrumental Tycho was back, with a new collaborator in Chris Taylor and a new thematic grounding in parenthood and physical presence.

The $160,000 Reverb Purge

In September 2023, between the release of “Time to Run” and “Small Sanctuary,” Hansen did something that sent a shockwave through the gear community: he listed nearly 100 pieces of studio equipment on Reverb.com, with a combined value exceeding $160,000. Everything was listed at fixed prices – no auctions, no drama – and essentially everything sold.

The sale was not a fire sale born of financial necessity. It was a philosophical act. “I’ve been collecting synthesizers and gear for about 25 years now,” Hansen explained in the Reverb preview video. “And I’ve found that throughout my career, I get inspired by new machines and new ways of working with machines, so I always try to keep things cycling in and out. And I think, at this point, it’s time to refresh.”

The inventory read like a museum catalog of the gear that had built some of the most recognizable records in Tycho’s discography. The Oberheim FVS-1 (Four Voice), a mid-1970s synthesizer valued at approximately $30,000, had been a foundational pad instrument across multiple albums. Hansen described it as a synth that “has a mind of its own” – a characterization that suggested both its creative value and its impracticality in a streamlined workflow. The Eventide H3000, a legendary effects processor, had been purchased specifically because Hansen learned that Eddie Van Halen used one. Its crystallizer effect and classic algorithms had shaped Tycho’s signature spatial sound for years.

A Korg Trident came with its own origin story. “I got this from a friend, and he thought it was broken, so I got it basically for nothing,” Hansen recalled in the preview video. “I went to RadioShack and got a cell phone battery… and I soldered it in there, and it started working.” He had been drawn to it partly because Boards of Canada were rumored to have used one, and its joystick-controlled wobbly vibrato had become part of his tonal vocabulary.

The rest of the collection was equally storied: a Sequential Prophet 5, a Moog Voyager, an Ursa Major Stargate 626 reverb unit, a Roland RE-201 Space Echo, an SSL G-Comp compressor, a Chandler Limited LTD-1 preamp (which Hansen called “one of my favorite preamps ever”), and dozens more. These were instruments that had appeared on Dive, Awake, and Epoch – the trilogy of albums that established Tycho as a major force.

So why sell them? The answer lies in the creative reset Hansen was undergoing. As he told MusicTech in an interview tied to the sale, the gear purge was connected to the new album he was developing (which would become Infinite Health). He wanted to strip back, to return to a more focused and computer-centric production approach. “The thing I’ve spent the 10,000 hours at is working in Reaper on a computer,” he explained in his GRAMMY.com interview. “That inspires me the most.”

This was a remarkable statement from an artist whose identity had been so deeply tied to analog hardware. Hansen was not abandoning analog entirely – he retained key instruments including his vintage Moog Minimoog Model D and Access Virus KC, which he identified as the two synths he could not do without. But he was acknowledging that the romantic narrative of the artist surrounded by vintage gear had become, in some ways, a constraint. The gear had accumulated into an obligation – instruments that needed maintenance, calibration, and space, many of which sat unused for months or years between sessions. Fatherhood and compressed studio time made the inefficiency more acute. Every minute spent troubleshooting a temperamental vintage synth was a minute not spent writing music or being present with his family.

The Reverb sale was, in this light, the material expression of the same philosophical shift that was driving the new music: a move toward essentialism, sustainability, and presence. Keep what serves the work. Let go of what serves only nostalgia.

Back to Mine (September 2022)

In September 2022, Hansen contributed an edition to Back to Mine, the long-running compilation series that invites artists to curate a mix representing the music they would play after a show – the decompression playlist, the late-night wind-down. Released on September 30, 2022, the compilation featured sixteen tracks and served as a window into Hansen’s listening life that fans rarely got to see.

The tracklist ranged across a wide emotional and temporal spectrum. It opened with a Bibio remix of Tycho’s own “Spectre” and moved through Casino Versus Japan’s “It’s Very Sunny,” Craft Spells’ “Our Park By Night,” and Schneider TM’s “Frogtoise.” Hansen included a Tycho remix of Little Dragon’s “Little Man” – previously unreleased – alongside an edit of his own “PBS” from 2006, reaching back to the earliest days of the project. The mix closed with selections from Slowdive (“Sugar for the Pill”) and Octo Octa (“Beam Me Up”), artists whose work occupied very different sonic territory but shared an emotional sensibility with Tycho’s own output.

DJ Mag named it Compilation of the Month, describing it as “an ascension into some giddy emotional highs, before deftly dropping back into a feather-soft plateau for its final moments.” The Back to Mine edition mattered because it demonstrated Hansen’s curatorial ear – his ability to build a coherent emotional arc from disparate sources – and because it kept Tycho’s name active during a period when no new original material was forthcoming. It was a holding pattern, but a graceful one.

Dive Live at Harlow’s (December 2022)

In December 2022, Hansen brought Tycho back to Sacramento for one of the most symbolically loaded performances of his career. Across three nights – December 9, 10, and 11 – the band performed the album Dive in its entirety at Harlow’s, the midtown Sacramento venue celebrating its 40th anniversary.

The significance was layered. Hansen had composed much of Dive in a converted garage just a couple of blocks from Harlow’s. He had spent countless nights at the venue as a patron, absorbing shows. Sacramento, as he put it, “is everything and was the backdrop for the whole album.” Playing Dive there was not just a nostalgic exercise – it was a return to the scene of the crime, a chance to perform the album that changed his life in the neighborhood where it was written.

It was Tycho’s first show at Harlow’s since 2014. The venue’s talent booker intentionally booked the residency as part of a “Harlow’s Anniversary Series” celebrating iconic performances, and both Hansen’s team and the venue recognized the symmetry: an anniversary for the club, a homecoming for the artist, and a full-album performance of the record that had made both of them famous in a particular way.

The shows were billed as “Dive Live” and represented the only West Coast performance of the full-album set. Each night, the band performed Dive front to back, then followed with a selection from the broader Tycho catalog. For fans who had discovered Tycho through Dive’s coastal, luminous warmth, the Harlow’s shows were a pilgrimage. For Hansen, they were a reminder of where he had started and how far the journey had taken him – a grounding exercise, not unlike the thematic concerns that were beginning to shape his next album.

The Creative Reset

By 2023, the outlines of Hansen’s transformation were visible. The pandemic had imposed stillness. Fatherhood had reordered priorities. Health concerns had introduced urgency. The gear purge had stripped away excess. And the singles – “Time to Run” and “Small Sanctuary” – had confirmed that the instrumental Tycho was back, with a leaner setup and a new collaborator in Chris Taylor.

Hansen described the shift in terms of balance. He wanted to stay connected to nature. He wanted to stay physically healthy. He wanted to work with machines in a way that was sustainable rather than compulsive. He wanted to be a stronger, healthier version of himself so that he could have a more positive impact on his family, his friends, and – he hoped – his audience. The music was no longer an end in itself, pursued at the expense of everything else. It was one component of a life he was actively trying to design.

This philosophical reorientation had direct creative consequences. The new album would be built on electronic production rather than the band-forward approach of Weather. It would be instrumental, with one carefully chosen vocal feature rather than a full vocal album. It would be made efficiently, in compressed time windows, using the tools Hansen knew best – primarily Reaper on a computer, supplemented by the handful of hardware synthesizers he had retained. And it would be thematically explicit in a way Tycho records had never been: about presence, about health, about being grounded in the current moment rather than chasing some imagined future.

Infinite Health (August 30, 2024)

Infinite Health arrived on August 30, 2024, on Mom + Pop (US) and Ninja Tune (international). It was Tycho’s sixth studio album – or seventh, depending on whether you count Simulcast as a standalone work rather than a companion piece – and by every measure it represented a new beginning.

Production and Personnel

The album was produced by Hansen with two key collaborators: Zac Brown, who had been Tycho’s guitarist since the Epoch era, and Chris Taylor of Grizzly Bear, whose mixing work on the 2023 singles had earned him a co-production role on the full record. Taylor’s influence was significant. His background in Grizzly Bear – a band known for intricate arrangements that balance warmth with rhythmic complexity – brought a perspective that complemented Hansen’s instincts without overriding them. The uptempo, danceable elements that appeared throughout Infinite Health were attributed in part to Taylor’s contributions.

Rory O’Connor played drums, and Billy Kim completed the touring band lineup. The core creative unit, however, was the triangle of Hansen, Brown, and Taylor – a producer-guitarist-mixer dynamic that gave the album its particular character.

The Title Track and Cautious Clay

The album’s sole vocal feature came on the title track, “Infinite Health,” which featured New York-based artist Cautious Clay. The collaboration had an organic origin: Hansen sent the working instrumental to Cautious Clay, who added vocals that functioned almost as another instrumental layer on the album version – present but not dominant, coloring the track without converting it into a conventional song.

The distinction between the album version and the full vocal version would become important later, when Hansen released the Where You Are EP with a version where Cautious Clay’s vocals took center stage. But on Infinite Health itself, the feature was restrained, integrated into the album’s overwhelmingly instrumental flow rather than disrupting it.

Tracklist and Sound

The nine-track album – “Consciousness Felt,” “Phantom,” “Restraint,” “Devices,” “Infinite Health” (feat. Cautious Clay), “Green,” “DX Odyssey,” “Totem,” and “Epilogue” – represented what Hansen described as a return to the bedroom electronic production approach that had led to Dive in 2011. The foundation was electronic: synthesizers, drum programming, and computer-based arrangement in Reaper, with guitar and live drums layered on top rather than serving as the structural basis.

The shift from Weather’s vocal-forward approach was total, but so was the shift from the lush analog hardware aesthetic of Dive, Awake, and Epoch. Where those albums had been built on rooms full of vintage synthesizers processed through racks of outboard gear, Infinite Health was leaner, more digitally grounded, and more rhythmically assertive. Hansen’s two indispensable synths – the Moog Minimoog Model D and the Access Virus KC – provided the core tonal palette. His signature technique of creating chords through reverb – not playing complex harmonic parts, but using reverbs and delays to let overlapping notes build into something larger – remained central.

Thematic Framework

Hansen was more explicitly thematic in discussing Infinite Health than he had been with any previous record. In his GRAMMY.com interview, published in September 2024, he described the album as an exercise in being “grounded in the now.” He had spent most of his career thinking about the future, he explained, but fatherhood had forced a recalibration. “Seeing these new lives come into the world and realizing they’re just starting this journey and how much they’re going to be affected by the experiences they have with you makes you think about your friends and your family.”

The album was “about being present and not being concerned with what’s coming down the road.” Hansen hoped it could “create this meditative space, where you can be a little bit more grounded in the now.” To 303 Magazine, he described Infinite Health as “about hope for the future and a requiem for the past” – a statement that captured the album’s emotional duality, its simultaneous forward momentum and backward glance.

The title itself was a personal mantra. At 47, Hansen was conscious of mortality in a way he had not been at 30. The physical demands of touring, the responsibility of parenthood, the awareness that his body was not infinite even if his creative ambitions were – all of this fed into the album’s conceptual framework. “Infinite Health” was an aspiration, not a claim. A prayer, not a diagnosis.

Critical Reception

The album received generally favorable reviews, though some critics noted familiar territory. The Indy Review called it “a beautiful and sonically cohesive gift to the world.” Stereofox praised its capacity for introspection: “Listening to Tycho is all about having a positive, mindful, and above all, introspective experience, something which this album perfectly excels at.” Exclaim! titled their review “Melodic Medicine,” capturing the album’s intended therapeutic function. The consensus acknowledged that Hansen was not reinventing himself so much as refining a voice that had been developing for two decades – and that the refinement, grounded in genuine life changes, gave the music a weight it might otherwise have lacked.

NPR World Cafe Session

In October 2024, Hansen appeared on NPR’s World Cafe for a session that included both an interview and live performances recorded in Ogden, Utah. He discussed what inspired Infinite Health, how evolving technology had streamlined his production process, and the balance between his work with vintage analog synths and the computer-based workflow that had become his primary instrument. The session captured Tycho at a point of creative confidence – an artist who had made deliberate choices about what to keep and what to release, both in his studio and in his life.

Where You Are EP (December 12, 2024)

Less than four months after Infinite Health, Hansen released the Where You Are EP on Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune, a six-track collection that extended and deepened the album’s world.

The EP led with the full vocal version of “Infinite Health” featuring Cautious Clay – the version where the vocals took center stage rather than functioning as an ambient texture. Hansen had felt this version deserved its own moment, separate from the album’s instrumental flow. The EP also included two new instrumental tracks, “To Everywhere Pt. 1” and “To Everywhere Pt. 2,” which formed a two-part odyssey that ranked among the most expansive work on either release. “DX Odyssey” and “Epilogue” reappeared from the album, and an extended edit of “Infinite Health” closed out the set.

The EP functioned as both a complement and a coda. It gave the Cautious Clay collaboration the standalone spotlight Hansen felt it deserved, introduced new material that expanded the Infinite Health sonic world, and wrapped up what Hansen himself described as “an eventful year.” By December 2024, he had a new album, a new EP, a revamped live show, and tour dates booked across North America, Europe, and Japan for 2025.

Label Continuity: Mom + Pop and Ninja Tune

A note on distribution, because it is sometimes confused in online discussions: throughout this entire period – from Simulcast in 2020 through Infinite Health and Where You Are in 2024 – Hansen released music through Mom + Pop Music (US) and Ninja Tune (international). He has not returned to Ghostly International, the label that released his early work including Dive and Awake. The Ghostly association is historically significant, and Ghostly’s web store still carries those earlier titles, but new Tycho releases since at least the Weather era have been on Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune. This is occasionally misstated in fan discussions and should be noted for accuracy.

The Through Line

The 2020-2024 period was, in many ways, the most internally dramatic of Hansen’s career, even if the music itself retained the calm and contemplation that had always defined Tycho. The drama was existential rather than sonic: a pandemic that halted a career in motion, a pivot to fatherhood that reorganized every priority, health concerns that introduced urgency, a deliberate stripping-away of accumulated tools and habits, and a creative partnership with Chris Taylor that brought new perspective to a well-established voice.

Simulcast proved the instrumental Tycho could survive the vocal experiment. The pandemic singles kept the project alive while Hansen recalibrated. The Reverb purge externalized the internal philosophy of less-is-more. The Harlow’s shows reconnected Hansen to the place where it all started. And Infinite Health delivered on the promise of all that reflection: an album made by someone who had thought carefully about what he wanted to say, how he wanted to say it, and – crucially – why he was still making music at all.

The answer, as it turned out, was both simple and profound. He was making music because it helped him be present. Because it created a meditative space. Because it was sustainable and meaningful. Because his children would grow up hearing it. Because health – physical, emotional, creative – was not a destination but a practice.

Infinite health. Not a state to achieve, but a direction to move in.

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