There wasn’t a ton of music played in my house when I was growing up. My mom had an affinity for the doo-wop sounds of the late 1950s and 60’s, but we rarely played anything aloud for us both to enjoy. That meant my biggest musical influences were Top 40 radio (RIP Power 100.5 FM out in Palm Springs) and what little I absorbed from MTV — which, beyond TRL, wasn’t much, since I was mostly drawn to episodes of Daria, The Real World, and sheepish glimpses of MTV Spring Break.
This left me hungry to develop my own musical taste. When I moved away from home after high school, I eventually discovered KCRW, a public radio station in LA with a stellar blend of news, music, and culture programming that remains a favorite of mine to this day. And when I moved to San Francisco in 2011, my roommates — as roommates do — introduced me to a wave of sounds and bands I hadn’t known about. One of those was Tycho, the dreamy, ambient electronic artist whose real name is Scott Hansen. His second full-length, Dive, was new at the time, and it and its successor, Awake, became a big part of the background soundtrack to my life in that city.
Fast-forward to the spring of 2026, when I got a text from a pal of mine who runs a production company here in LA. He asked if I had any interest in directing a project with Tycho for Adobe. In addition to producing music, Hansen is well known for designing all of his own album artwork, concert posters, and other design artifacts. He even uses another alias, ISO50, for his design work, and briefly worked at Adobe back in the Macromedia days.
The project wound up involving an expansive interview with Hansen in his home studio near Oakland, and documenting a live performance of his at the newly renovated Castro Theatre in San Francisco. Fifteen years after being introduced to Tycho’s music, I’d end up directing a profile of the man in a venue just around the corner from my old apartment.
Scott turned out to be a gem of a story subject — generous with his time and energy, and keen to help our crew get everything we were looking for.
During the live performance, I was pleading backstage with Hansen’s tour manager to let us film a quick post-show interview when the band started playing the song “Awake”. I interrupted myself to tell him that the song had been my alarm clock music for ten years when I lived in the city. He looked at me and said, “Dude, you need to go out there and listen to it.” I did.
Check out the full length film here.
