By Hannah Golden
I’ve seen a bunch of the interviews that you’ve done, and there’s been brief mention of the various influences. And I know people have said that you don’t necessarily listen to electronic music in your free time. But I was wondering, what you would describe as your influences?
I mean, I do listen to electronic music in some sort, like the DJ sets and stuff… I actually, sadly, don’t really listen to much music anymore at all. I don’t really know when or where that happened, but I just think it’s something about all day everyday working on music and being at shows and stuff that, when I do have spare time, I just like silence, you know?
But I mean, that being said, there’s things here and there that have definitely been big over the last few years. … Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss are definitely two primary influences on the sound I’d say.
And you can definitely hear that all the way up to Dive. I think there’s elements of that in Awake, but I think Awake definitely takes more into account the fact that most of my life growing up and even now I pretty much listen to rock and that kind of music and I think that’s slowly finding its way into the music. 
I know there are these recurring themes that appear, in the visuals anyways—kind of water themes and light themes, and there’s also a lot of basic shapes going on. Is there any sort of like larger picture there? Is it simplicity that you’re aiming for with the visuals, or? What’s your overall inspiration for those?
The intent was to be an extension of my poster art and just kind of put movement into my posters. So you’re going to find some of those themes recurring. And for me, all those things just come from, kind of, the things that I see when I hear the music or when I’m creating music. I’m just trying to find a way to make those real.
After a year of having Awake out, is there anything you’d change about it?
There’s always going to be something that you feel like, “Ah, I wish I had done that differently.” But really, something about Awake for me just kind of hit the sweet spot…there are no glaring issues with it. And it’s really the first time in my career with any of my work that I’ve been really just truly satisfied with the thing as a whole.
I know you said that the title track “Awake” was born over a single night of work, essentially. But do you set out to create a complete album that’s cohesive, or is there sort of one point of inspiration that all these other songs come from?
Yeah, definitely. Dive ended up that way and that’s how people hear it. It was kind of a fluke, because I created those songs over so many years, you know? Some of those songs were four years old by the time the album came out.
But at the end of the process, bringing it all together, you’ve got to pick songs that really work together, and that was part of the conscious process with Dive. And you know, there’s going to be this sound quality to it, just because they’re all from a similar era in my development. Even though it took many years, I wasn’t really spending as much time on music, so I wasn’t developing that quickly. So…it’s not like there’s these radically different songs.
But with Awake, that was absolutely the goal, to create an album album, to create a snapshot in a very short period of your career—this was the kind of sound I was going for, these were the songs I was writing. So, yeah, all the songs are from a distinct period and they’re all kind of created in the same vein.
Tycho plays 8pm Sunday, March 15 at the McDonald Theater; $25.
Note: Hannah Golden was recently quoted in the March 12 story “Interested in creative writing? Here’s how to get involved at the University of Oregon”.