Ambient music project offers a live symphony for the senses

Watching a DJ hover over a laptop to present music during a show is often enough for electronic music fans.

Scott Hansen, founder of San Francisco-based Tycho, wants his music to extend beyond that.

Over the years, Hansen pondered how to present Tycho’s multilayered and textural music in a live setting — making it multisensory, engaging and organic. Ultimately, he’s worked to reshape how electronic music can be presented onstage, bridging the gap between digital and live music.

Tycho makes a Honolulu debut Monday at The Republik, bringing its brand of music along with an audiovisual experience.

The guitars, bass, drums and synthesizers heard on Tycho records are presented with a live band, weaving together ambient and atmospheric sounds. Synth effects glide along the melodies, and together they coast along genre lines of alternative rock and electronic music.

There is no vocalist — the music is entirely instrumental — but there are plenty of visual effects, filled with color schemes and images. Hansen, whose background is in graphic design, creates the effects and has them projected onto the stage as the band performs.

“I want to engage with the audience, and I want them to feel this is happening right now in front of us,” Hansen said, reached by phone at his home in San Francisco. “That was always the goal for me. The music is so textural and multifaceted, with all these layers and weird studio tricks and effects going on.

“It’s also a huge challenge for us. We don’t want it to sound exactly like the record, but we want it to sound good and have these people be, ‘Yeah, that’s that song, and it sounds the way I want it to sound!’”

HANSEN SAID he wants his performances to be more than “a guy hunched over some electronics.” For him, putting together a band for electronic music was a means to not only engage and connect with fans, but offer an appreciation of the music.

Ultimately, he hopes fans can return home, listen to his records and pick them apart.

“For my parents and some of my friends, it was kind of an educational thing, and I hope it was for other people,” Hansen said. “That’s always been the goal. What we’ve been working towards is furthering that and opening up everything, even the more esoteric elements of the show where we’re tweaking delay titles, working with a sampler; hoping to find a way to have that connect and translate in the live context.”

Honolulu is a quick stop (Hansen said they’ll probably walk on the beach for a few minutes) on a tour that journeys into Asia, Australia and Europe.

“Epoch,” his last album, was released Sept. 30. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart.

In December it scored Tycho’s first Grammy nomination, in the Best Dance/Electronic Album category. Hansen’s wife woke up him with the surprising news.

“Never in a million years had I thought we’d end up getting nominated,” Hansen said. “It was a shock and a very pleasant surprise.”

“EPOCH” SERVES as a kind of homage to Tycho’s previous releases, Hansen said.

“Dive,” released in 2011, took five years to complete as Hansen worked during the day as a graphic designer and web developer.

Released in 2014, “Awake” generated more attention, peaking at 23 on the Billboard Top 200.

Zac Brown, a collaborator who also contributes guitar and bass, and drummer Rory O’Connor joined Tycho in the studio and onstage during that time. Billy Kim is on the current tour, contributing guitar, keyboard and bass.

“I felt like this was really a great opportunity to circle back and kind of take into account everything that’s happened before that,” Hansen said. “Take the best of what I thought was the core statement of ‘Dive’ and what I thought was that energetic element of ‘Awake’ and try to bring those together and then create something that spoke to where I’m at now and where we’d been.”

Tycho recently performed at an Oakland, Calif., fundraiser held in response to the December Ghost Ship warehouse fire, which killed 36 concertgoers.

Hansen felt a personal connection to Oakland’s underground music scene, a place where he discovered electronic music in the mid-’90s. When he started Tycho, he often played in warehouses in Sacramento, Calif., and the Bay Area.

“That scene is what I credit with why I even make music, or why I was able to start playing shows or get my music recognized,” Hansen said. “I think any artist in this area owes a debt to the underground scene, whether they were directly involved within it or not. I myself owe a very direct debt to it, and to see the scene just wipe out overnight was pretty intense.”