Awake is the album where Scott Hansen, the San Francisco-based visual artist and musician who records as Tycho, expands into a far-reaching space. He's made gorgeously constructed techno under this name for over a decade, ultimately gaining traction with the sunny Dive in 2011. In the context of Awake—the first Tycho record recorded as a three-piece band—his previous albums now sound like mere dreams of the luminous world he was trying so hard to connect to. Here, Hansen gains a skip in his step and strides right into that place, largely due to a shedding of the muddied beats and wistful synth tones that positioned him a little too close to Boards of Canada's retro-futuristic notions. There's more air here, lending a greater expanse of room to move around in than before, like travelling from a rundown seaside resort to vast scoops of desert plane. It's still recognizable as a Tycho recording, with a familiar sense of melancholy and the embers of sundown burning through it, but with the ambition clearly heightened right from the first few notes.
Not for nothing does the echoey guitar clang that opens a couple of these tracks (notably "Awake" and "See") sound like the Edge's long-familiar tones in U2. It's not exactly stadium-leaning, but if what came before felt more like bedroom creations, then here the Tycho sound is taken into a different area entirely, where everything glistens so brightly it feels like the work of someone who thinks the Beatles' career began and ended with the ultra clean lines of "Here Comes the Sun". Something it shares with Dive is the feeling of journey, where tracks heard in isolation won’t make as much sense as picking up the long thread from beginning to end. "Montana" may reach a greater point of euphoria than the moodier "Dye", but watching how Hansen and his band arrive there is part of the thrill, with disparate moods slowly slotting into one another in a perfectly natural flow.
The sense of build Hansen possesses—knowing when to add and subtract, when to fade and zoom right back into focus—was a central tenet of the Dive sound, and it's a sensibility he retains here, although it doesn't always stop his work from circling perilously close to redundancy. "Apogee" is clearly supposed to be born from a moment of discordance, but it's an all-too brief divergence that makes it feel like the ideas are running dry when he returns to his tastefully constructed loops for the bulk of the track. Fortunately, Hansen keeps things brief, cutting Awake dead around the 35-minute mark after eight tracks. A common problem with bringing live instrumentation into techno is the heavy handedness that can set in—a dilemma the Field's live-band incarnation often grapples with—although that's rarely an issue here. Only on "Spectre" does the subtlety loosen, but even there it offers release from the strong sense of control that can feel suffocating when the Tycho sound is so thoroughly pinned down.
Where all this leads Hansen and his creation is into a great pool of reflective thought, typified by the introspective guitar strum of "Plains". It feels like this is Tycho mining an older strain of music than the more contemporary references of Dive. There are nods to post-rock, but this feels like it's reaching further toward the sources of that genre than the acts themselves, with Tortoise's aping of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells on TNT emerging as a strong reference point. Lessons have been learned from Dive here—this is a much leaner record that feels skillfully edited, with less use for indulgence and circular routes that don't lead anywhere. It could use a break from the pensive train of thought at times, and the tentative branches away from that mode suggest it's under consideration, if still not quite there yet. But the strong feeling of movement Hansen creates, as he quietly creeps through shades of orangey color, comes packed with dualling strains of sorrow and empathy.
