The year 2025 marked the full flowering of the Infinite Health era — a campaign that had germinated with the album’s August 30, 2024 release and grew into the most geographically ambitious touring cycle Scott Hansen had ever attempted under the Tycho name. Across twelve months, the project moved through Japanese clubs, European theaters, Mexican resort stages, and North American mid-capacity halls, culminating in a year-end surprise release that reshaped the canon and offered a new interpretive lens on the material that had been circulating all year from stage to stage. The Where You Are EP, issued via Ninja Tune, arrived not as a premeditated marketing exercise but as an organic extension of a creative period that Hansen has described in terms of optimism and forward momentum — a “upbeat meditation,” in his own framing, on the possibility of wellness as both theme and lived condition.
To understand the 2025 cycle in full, it is necessary to hold two things in focus simultaneously: the rigorous logistical enterprise of a world tour spanning three continents, and the quieter creative act of producing and releasing new music that deepened and complicated the album that preceded it. These were not parallel projects that happened to coincide. They were the same project, expressed through different channels.
Philosophical Foundations: From Hiatus to Infinite Health
The four years preceding the Infinite Health album had been, by Hansen’s account, a period of deliberate stillness. The global pandemic forced a halt to a decade of continuous touring, and rather than treat that interruption as an inconvenience, Hansen used it to fundamentally re-examine his relationship with both the process of making music and the experience of performing it. What emerged from that reflection was a body of work organized around a single, almost defiant thesis: that optimism is not naivety, but a discipline.
This philosophical shift had direct aesthetic consequences. The earlier Tycho catalog — Dive (2011), Awake (2014), Epoch (2016) — had operated in registers that were frequently described as introspective and, at times, elegiac. The Weather album (2019) introduced the human voice as a new instrument through Hannah Cottrell’s work under the Saint Sinner moniker, which Hansen had long considered: treating the voice not as a vehicle for lyrical content but as a tonal element, an organic texture woven through the synthetic architecture of his productions. Infinite Health retained that vocal integration while tilting the emotional compass toward brightness and resolution.
For the live show, this meant a particular kind of challenge. Hansen’s stated objective for the 2025 dates was to present what he called a “cohesive statement” — a set that could encompass the early sampler-based material from the Past Is Prologue era alongside the polished, high-fidelity productions of the new album, without the seams showing. The preparation was months-long, involving the distillation of complex studio arrangements into a configuration that could survive the acoustic variables of fifteen different European cities in twenty-two days, or the ambient humidity of an outdoor stage in San José del Cabo.
The live band configuration that carried the show through 2025 retained the essential structure established during the Dive era: Zac Brown on bass and guitar, and Rory O’Connor on live drum kit. This combination of sequenced programming and kinetic human performance — the fundamental synthesis that had always defined the Tycho live experience — remained the operational core. Around it, Hansen had built what would prove to be the most technically sophisticated production rig the project had ever deployed.
Technical Production: The 2025 Live Rig
The hardware at the center of Hansen’s 2025 stage setup represents a studied negotiation between analog warmth and digital precision — a negotiation that mirrors, in miniature, the broader aesthetic project of the Infinite Health era.
The Minimoog occupies the apex of the synthesis hierarchy, used specifically for what Hansen has described as “soul-piercing” leads. The instrument appears with particular prominence on the live version of “Devices,” where its characteristic single-voice pressure and the particular harmonic richness of its filter sweep provide a textural counterpoint to the more diffuse pad layers surrounding it. The Access Virus TI handles the atmospheric architecture — the evolving pads and complex digital soundscapes that form the ambient infrastructure of most Tycho sets. For MIDI control and DAW interaction, Hansen relied on the Akai MPK25 and a Key 37 controller, which serve as the primary interface between the performer and the sequenced elements running underneath the live instrumentation.
The Moog Messenger features in Hansen’s 2025 setup for both writing and live performance contexts, valued specifically for its patch memory depth and what he has called its high playability — an instrument that rewards improvisation within a live context that is otherwise tightly structured. For bass textures, Hansen alternates between a Fender Precision Bass and the Moog Prodigy, using the latter to push into a more synthesized low-end register when the arrangement calls for it. Guitar processing runs through a Bogner Duende Head that has been modified to fit a 19-inch rack space — a practical accommodation to the realities of touring, where backline consistency across different international venues cannot be assumed.
One of the most consequential elements of the 2025 rig is the Apollo/UAD-2 Live Rack, a system that allows every instrument in the live signal chain to pass through high-end studio plugins at near-zero latency. The practical effect of this system is to close the gap between what the record sounds like and what the performance sounds like — the UAD processing effectively turns the rack itself into an instrument, one that Hansen “plays” through real-time manipulation of effects parameters. This approach reflects Hansen’s background as a studio producer who thinks in terms of signal chains and whose fingerprint on a piece of music is as much about the processing as the notes.
In the software domain, Hansen’s delay and reverb approach centers on the Soundtoys EchoBoy plugin, configured in a “Memory Man” style that treats echo not as an effect but as an integral component of the instrument being processed — an approach that has been central to the Tycho sound since the early catalog. The Softube Model 84, a Juno emulation that Hansen has praised for its polyphonic synthesis quality, handles the characteristic pad voicings that give the live show its particular mid-frequency warmth. For specific synth leads — including those developed for tracks like “Boundary Rider” — Hansen relies on u-he Zebra2. Front-end guitar and bass processing runs through the Origin Effects RevivalDRIVE, which provides tonal consistency regardless of what backline hardware is available at any given venue.
Hansen has articulated his sonic target for the live show in period-specific terms: he is aiming for what he calls “a big console sound from the 1970s and 80s,” the particular kind of weight and dimensionality associated with large-format desk recordings from the era that shaped his musical imagination. The UAD system is the principal means by which that studio-era quality is maintained in a live context.
The visual component of the 2025 production — developed, as always, under Hansen’s ISO50 design persona — represented the largest visual deployment the project had undertaken. The 2025 visuals were explicitly designed to evoke wide-open natural environments: the high deserts of Wyoming and Colorado, the kind of expansive, unpeopled landscapes that have informed Hansen’s graphic work since its earliest iterations. These visuals were synchronized directly to the DAW, meaning that every rhythmic pulse in the music corresponded to a discrete visual shift on the projection surfaces. The effect was one of genuine synchrony rather than loose accompaniment — the visuals functioning as a second melodic voice, responsive to the music at the level of individual beats.
The Winter Campaign: January in North America and Japan
The 2025 touring year opened in the eastern United States, with a run of dates in January that served as both continuation of the late 2024 North American leg and proving ground for a production that would shortly travel to three other continents. On January 10, Tycho performed at Music Farm in Charleston, South Carolina — a club-sized room that placed the production in close quarters with the audience. The following night, January 11, the tour moved to the House of Blues in Orlando, Florida, with Bad Tuner opening. Fan reports from the Orlando show highlighted the effectiveness of the ISO50 lighting in the venue’s physical layout, though reviewers noted that volume levels occasionally crossed into what was described as “crunchy” territory — a phenomenon of the House of Blues acoustic environment rather than a production choice, but one that periodically obscured the more delicate synth layers in the arrangements. On January 22, the North American winter leg continued with a date at Théâtre Beanfield in Montreal, Quebec.
From the North American winter dates, Tycho pivoted to Japan for a two-city residency that represented the project’s first return to the country as a headliner in eight years. The Japan leg was framed around a theme that Hansen and his team titled “Hope for the Future and Requiem for the Past” — language that acknowledged both the longevity of the project’s relationship with Japanese audiences and the forward-facing character of the Infinite Health material. Japan has occupied a particular place in Hansen’s understanding of his audience: he has cited his experiences at Fuji Rock Festival as formative, not merely as performances but as encounters with what he calls a “built environment” for music — events where the setting, the audience culture, and the audio fidelity conspire to create something that exceeds what any individual element could produce.
On January 30, Tycho performed at Billboard Live Osaka, with same-day tickets priced at ¥9,300. The show was promoted and managed by SMASH, the Japanese concert promotion company that has handled several significant Western electronic act tours in the country. The following day, January 31, the Tokyo performance took place at Spotify O-EAST — a venue whose specialized LED infrastructure provided a particularly receptive canvas for the ISO50 visual sets. General sale tickets moved through ePlus, Japan’s primary ticketing platform. The Spotify O-EAST show functioned as the technical anchor for the Asian leg: a room designed for electronic music, equipped for the kind of audiovisual precision that Hansen’s production demands, and filled with an audience whose attentiveness to high-fidelity reproduction aligned with the project’s own priorities.
The European and UK Spring Leg: Fifteen Cities in Twenty-Two Days
In March 2025, Tycho launched the first comprehensive European and UK tour in five years — a densely routed circuit that moved through fifteen cities between March 6 and March 28. The organizational infrastructure included support from Soundsphere and Indieofilo, with pre-sale access offered to the Tycho Open Source Community beginning September 18, 2024, ahead of general sales on September 20.
The leg opened on March 6 at KOKO in London — the former theater in Camden whose distinctive vertical architecture, with its stacked viewing tiers overlooking the main floor, creates an unusual sight-line environment for a production built around projected visuals. The ISO50 projections, designed for venues where the audience occupies a single horizontal plane, had to contend with KOKO’s geometry, but fan reports described the result as “stunning” — the vertical expansion of the space amplifying rather than diminishing the visual impact. Support was provided by Tonic Walter, whose set was characterized in reviews as providing energetic contrast with Tycho’s more expansive and measured approach.
The KOKO night was not without logistical friction. Doors opened on schedule, but the main performance did not begin until after 21:00, generating some dissatisfaction among attendees over the extended gap between support and headliner. Such timing issues are endemic to multi-support touring schedules in European markets, where local curfew regulations and union rules around stage turnover create structural constraints that touring productions must navigate. The band’s performance, when it arrived, was described across multiple independent reports as “tight” — a word that recurs in Tycho fan discourse to denote the particular quality of a live set where the sequenced elements and the human performers have achieved genuine synchrony.
From London, the tour moved north into Scandinavia: Oslo’s Vulkan Arena on March 10, Nalen in Stockholm on March 11, Pumpehuset in Copenhagen on March 13. The Vulkan Arena and Nalen both occupy mid-sized positions in their respective cities’ venue hierarchies — rooms capacious enough to support the full ISO50 visual rig without the production feeling cramped, but intimate enough that the spatial relationship between performer and audience remained immediate.
The German date on March 14 brought the tour to Huxley’s in Berlin — one of the city’s established independent rock venues, with the kind of industrial-inflected aesthetic that provides an interesting counterpoint to Tycho’s natural-landscape visual language. Warsaw’s Palladium followed on March 16, and Roxy Prague on March 17. Budapest’s Durer Kert hosted the March 18 date — a multi-stage venue in Budapest’s historic seventh district, which has become one of central Europe’s most significant independent music locations.
The southern European dates brought the tour to Magazzini Generali in Milan on March 20, then to Paris’s Trabendo on March 22 — a medium-capacity room in the 19th arrondissement, at the edge of the Parc de la Villette complex, that has hosted a significant proportion of the important independent electronic touring acts of the past two decades. The Belgium date on March 23 placed Tycho at Wintercircus in Gent — a venue housed in a former circus building whose circular architecture presents its own set of visual and acoustic challenges.
Amsterdam’s Melkweg on March 24 represented one of the most significant single-venue moments of the European leg. The Melkweg — Dutch for “Milky Way” — occupies a position in Amsterdam’s cultural geography comparable to what the Roxy had been to New York or what the Hacienda was to Manchester: a venue whose history is inseparable from the history of electronic music in continental Europe. For a project like Tycho, with its particular investment in the idea of music as environmental experience, performing at the Melkweg carries specific symbolic weight.
The Iberian dates — Sala Apolo in Barcelona on March 26 and Sala But in Madrid on March 27 — brought the European leg to its penultimate stops. In Barcelona, tickets were priced at approximately €28, positioning the show as a competitive-value proposition in a market where international electronic touring acts often command premium pricing. The Portugal finale on March 28 at LAV1 in Lisbon closed the European leg twenty-two days after it had opened in London.
The Mexico Residency: Viva El Gonzo and Foro Indie Rocks
In May, the tour’s focus shifted south to Mexico — a market that had become increasingly significant for the project and one that offered two very different performance environments within four days.
Viva El Gonzo was held from May 8 through May 10 in San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur, curated by the jam band Goose. The event positioned itself as a successor concept to Camp Bisco, the long-running “trance-fusion” festival that had operated from Scranton, Pennsylvania, now relocated to a tropical coastal resort environment. The primary venue partnership was with Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel that has established itself as a destination for music tourism on the Baja peninsula. Tycho headlined alongside The War On Drugs and Goose, a pairing that reflected Viva El Gonzo’s particular crossover positioning — a festival designed for audiences that move between jamtronica, indie rock, and electronic music without experiencing these as contradictory tastes.
Tycho’s Viva El Gonzo appearances were staged at the Crania venue, with a headlining set beginning at 8:00 PM on May 8 and a late-night set at 12:15 AM on May 9. The outdoor desert-and-coastal environment of Crania required a different calibration of the ISO50 visual system than the enclosed venues of the European leg — high-contrast visual approaches that could hold their own against ambient light and the visual drama of the physical landscape. The setlist for the festival sets was shaped around the rhythmic and guitar-forward tracks that resonate with a festival crossover audience, emphasizing the propulsive, kinetic side of the Infinite Health material.
The May 11 show at Foro Indie Rocks! in Mexico City has been widely identified by fans and critics who attended as one of the definitive performances of the entire Infinite Health touring cycle. The venue — mid-sized, intimate relative to the scale of the festival appearances, and known for excellent acoustics and attentive booking — provided conditions under which the retrospective ambition of Hansen’s setlist could be fully realized.
The Mexico City setlist is one of the most thoroughly documented sets of the 2025 year. Opening with “Phantom” from Infinite Health, the set moved through “Spectre” and “Hours” (bridging Dive and Awake), “Weather” from the 2019 album, “Consciousness Felt” from Infinite Health, “A Walk” from Dive, “Green” from Infinite Health, and then into the deep retrospective territory of “PBS” from Past Is Prologue — one of the project’s earliest formative pieces, a track from a period before Tycho was a touring entity at all. The inclusion of “PBS” in this position, midway through the set, was a deliberate compositional choice: the oldest material serving as a kind of structural anchor, a reminder of where the project’s harmonic and melodic DNA had originated.
The set continued with “L” from Awake, “Horizon” from Epoch, and three more Infinite Health tracks — “Devices,” “Time to Run,” and “Totem” — before the main set closed with “Awake.” The encore brought “Apogee” from Awake and “Division” from Epoch. The total picture was of a band confident enough in the new material to lead with it and bookend with it, while trusting that the older catalog would land with the same force. Fan reports from the Mexico City show describe the “dreamy soundscapes” of the performance and the tightness of the band — a four-piece ensemble whose individual contributions had, by this point in the touring cycle, become genuinely interlocked.
The SeaBisco Alaska Cancellation
The most operationally significant event of the 2025 cycle that did not happen was the SeaBisco Alaska cruise — a festival event that, had it occurred, would have represented one of the most conceptually audacious performance contexts Tycho had ever accepted.
SeaBisco was conceived as a collaboration between the Disco Biscuits, the cruise event specialists Sixthman, and Vibee, scheduled to sail September 9 through 15 aboard the Norwegian Jade. The itinerary called for departure from Seattle, with port stops in Juneau, Sitka, and Victoria, B.C. — an itinerary that would have placed the performances against the backdrop of Alaskan glaciers, fjords, and the maritime topography of the North Pacific. Tycho was booked for both live band sets and DJ sets, making the project one of the pillars of a lineup that also included Chromeo, Lotus, and Of The Trees.
The event was marketed in terms that aligned closely with what Hansen has consistently described as his aesthetic inspiration: the relationship between music and extreme natural environments, the idea that the right setting can transform a performance into something that exceeds what either the setting or the performance could achieve independently. Alaskan glaciers as backdrop for ISO50 visuals and Infinite Health material — the conceptual resonance was genuine.
The cancellation was announced in December 2024, before the 2025 touring year had even properly begun. The Disco Biscuits and the SeaBisco production team issued a formal statement citing a cluster of interlocking logistical failures. The Norwegian Jade’s outdoor Pool Deck, which had been identified as the primary performance space for the high-production electronic sets, proved technically infeasible once the production team had modeled the actual requirements against the ship’s physical constraints. The alternative was the Stardust Theater, an indoor venue that was simply too small to contain the expected audience. Weather and sound restrictions compounded the problem: the North Pacific in September is not a hospitable environment for outdoor electronic production, and Alaskan port cities impose noise restrictions that would have severely limited what could be achieved during port calls.
All ticket payments were refunded by January 3, 2025. The cancellation removed what would have been a centerpiece of the fall touring calendar and left the Tycho-Alaskan-glacier performance as an unrealized concept — an idea that existed as a booking confirmation and a marketing campaign but never as a set of sounds bouncing off ice and water.
Summer and Late-Season North American Dates
The summer months saw the tour return to North American soil for a series of dates that included both headlining club and theater appearances and festival slots. The Boulder Theater hosted a show during this period, and The Midway in San Francisco was the site of one of the most discussed single-venue moments of the entire year: during the performance of “Phantom,” the band had to restart the introductory sequence twice. In a different context, this kind of technical incident might register as a mark against the show. In the Tycho fan community, the consensus reading was more generous — an appreciation for the live complexity that the show involves, and for Hansen’s commitment to getting the sequencing right rather than forcing through a compromised version. The incident offered a rare window into the real-time demands of synchronizing hardware synthesis, DAW sequences, and live instrumentation in front of an audience.
The Sacramento show at Channel 24 was singled out in fan discourse as one of the best of the tour — high energy, a responsive crowd, and a room whose acoustics suited the production particularly well. The contrast with the Chicago show at Salt Shed was instructive. Salt Shed is a large converted industrial venue, and the crowd behavior there generated significant comment: multiple fan reports described a “cocktail party” atmosphere, a crowd that was present but not fully engaged in the immersive terms that the production assumed. This is a recurring tension in the Tycho live experience, one that Hansen himself has acknowledged — music that is widely used for focused individual listening (work, study, meditation) attracts audiences who may not have a shared physical performance language, who are not sure whether to dance, stand still, or simply allow the sound to wash over them. The Salt Shed complaints were not about the music or the production but about the social environment of the room — which is, in a sense, a tribute to how much the Tycho show asks of its audience beyond passive attendance.
Denver generated its own variety of crowd dynamics discussion. Fan reports noted that the presence of non-dancing audience members at the front rail during DJ set segments created an awkward energy — a tension between those who had come to move and those who had come to listen. The Denver DJ set also marked one of the more adventurous programmatic choices of the year, with Hansen incorporating UK Garage tracks into the late-night set — a departure from the established Tycho sonic signature that was received with surprise and, generally, enthusiasm.
The 20th Anniversary DJ Set at The Independent in San Francisco was a sold-out event — one of several sold-out shows across the year, including various European dates and the festival headline slots. The Independent is a 500-capacity room in the Lower Haight, long-established as one of San Francisco’s premier independent music venues, and selling out that room for a solo DJ set in a city where Hansen had spent much of his creative life represents a particular kind of marker for the project’s standing in its home territory.
Fan Culture and the Tycho Open Source Community
The Tycho Open Source Community — the project’s long-running fan organization, name a deliberate echo of open-source software culture’s emphasis on accessibility and collective ownership — played a structural role in the 2025 touring cycle. Pre-sale access for the European dates was extended to the community from September 18, 2024, ahead of general sales two days later. This pre-sale privilege functions as both a practical benefit and a signal of recognition: the community’s most dedicated members are the ones who most reliably show up, who travel for shows, who document setlists and post detailed reviews.
The community’s output from the 2025 tour constitutes a significant documentary record. Setlist archives, venue-by-venue acoustic assessments, discussions of song selection and sequencing choices, comparisons of different performances of the same track across different cities — this material exists primarily on Reddit and in dedicated forum threads, and it represents a kind of distributed critical apparatus that operates in parallel with (and often at greater depth than) mainstream press coverage. The critical discourse within the community around the Chicago Salt Shed crowd atmosphere, or the SeaBisco cancellation, or the restarted “Phantom” sequence at The Midway, illustrates the degree to which Tycho’s audience has developed sophisticated frameworks for evaluating live performance.
Ticket pricing across the 2025 tour reflected a deliberate mid-market positioning. General admission at North American club dates typically started at $50.00, with the average ticket price across the tour tracking at approximately $57.33, and VIP seating reaching up to $70.20 in some markets. The most affordable North American market was Ogden, Utah, where median ticket prices ran to approximately $12 — a data point that reflects both the economics of smaller secondary markets and a pricing philosophy that has kept Tycho shows accessible across income levels. In Europe, Spanish dates were priced at roughly €28 for general admission, consistent with the tour’s overall approach of keeping club-show pricing competitive with local market norms. Japanese tickets were approximately ¥9,300 — appropriate for the project’s international touring tier in that market.
The project’s global audience of over 1.1 million monthly Spotify listeners provided the commercial foundation for a touring operation of this scale, with “Awake” and “A Walk” continuing to function as the primary discovery tracks that introduce new listeners to the catalog and drive ticket sales for both live band shows and DJ sets.
The Where You Are EP: A Surprise Year-End Release
Against this backdrop of extensive touring activity, the release of the Where You Are EP via Ninja Tune arrived as what the label described as a surprise expansion of the Infinite Health album — released without a protracted pre-release campaign, announced and dropped in close temporal proximity, a deliberate departure from the multi-month single rollout that had characterized major label releasing strategies in the streaming era.
The EP’s primary promotional engine was the release of a vocal rework of “Infinite Health” — a version that had not previously been available publicly, shared on the exact day of the EP’s release. This represented a significant addition to the catalog: a new vocal treatment of a track that listeners had known and toured with for months, reframed through the kind of vocal integration that had defined the Weather era. The EP was made simultaneously available on major DSPs and on Bandcamp, the latter allowing the project to maintain its direct relationship with the portion of its audience that prefers platform-independent purchasing.
The visual identity developed for the Where You Are EP rollout marked a significant departure from the aesthetic language Hansen had maintained across the previous decade of releases. Where the earlier Tycho visual universe — developed through the ISO50 brand — had been organized around natural landscapes, organic minimalism, sun-faded photography, and the color palette of the American West, the EP’s visual presentation drew from “neon-noir” and 1980s Italo Disco references. The shift was deliberate and striking: fluorescent hues, graphic contrast, and the kind of urban nocturnal imagery associated with the visual culture of Italian electronic music at its commercial peak. This represented Hansen exercising the same prerogative he had exercised throughout the Infinite Health era — the willingness to make a decisive turn rather than continue mining a visual vein that had already been thoroughly exhausted.
The label context for the release — Ninja Tune — placed the EP within one of independent electronic music’s most prestigious imprints, a London-based label that had been a significant force in the development of sophisticated electronic music since the early 1990s and whose roster had consistently bridged the gap between experimental electronic production and commercially viable independent releases. Founded in 1990 by Coldcut, Ninja Tune built its reputation on releases that resisted easy genre categorization while maintaining a commitment to craft and originality that made the imprint a reliable indicator of quality for adventurous listeners. For a project that had navigated multiple label relationships across its history, the Ninja Tune association signaled both institutional credibility and access to a distribution infrastructure suited to the EP’s simultaneous multi-platform release strategy.
The Bandcamp component of the release is worth noting specifically. In an era when streaming royalties have collapsed to a level that makes catalog-deep engagement economically marginal for artists, the decision to release simultaneously on Bandcamp — where the artist capture rate is dramatically higher than on DSP platforms — reflects an understanding of Tycho’s fan base as one that skews toward engaged, paying listeners rather than passive streamers. The Tycho Open Source Community, which had organized pre-sale access for the European tour leg just months earlier, represents precisely this demographic: fans who have demonstrated willingness to commit financially to the project, whether through ticket purchases or direct music purchases. The Bandcamp release was a direct address to that constituency.
The “Infinite Health” vocal rework that anchored the EP’s release day requires some contextual framing. The track had been the title piece of the album and had accumulated months of audience familiarity — listeners had encountered it in the live show, processed it through thousands of individual listening sessions, developed their own relationships with its particular sonic and emotional register. To release a vocal version on the day the EP dropped was to offer those listeners an act of reinterpretation of something they believed they already knew. The vocal treatment introduced a human presence that the original mix had withheld, and in doing so changed the emotional coordinates of the piece. This is precisely the kind of creative gamble that Hansen had already taken once with the Weather album — introducing the voice as instrument to an audience that had organized its appreciation of Tycho around the absence of the voice — and the EP’s primary single demonstrated that the instinct had not dulled.
Coverage of the Where You Are EP was concentrated in independent music media. Northern Transmissions provided what was characterized as extensive and detailed breakdown of the release, and the project received substantial attention from electronic-focused digital magazines and independent music blogs. Mainstream press coverage was more limited — a reflection less of critical reception than of the structural realities of year-end releasing, when publication calendars are compressed and major outlets are publishing retrospective and list-driven content rather than reviewing new material. The Tidal catalog page and Bleep’s ongoing Tycho archival coverage provided additional context for the EP’s placement within the broader discography.
The material from the EP was integrated into live setlists following its release, though the specific debut dates for individual EP tracks in the live context require archival verification through setlist documentation. The trajectory was consistent with how Hansen had handled the Weather material: new recordings finding their way into the live show on a gradual basis, tested in specific markets before becoming regularized parts of the set. The neon-noir visual identity was also designed with future live integration in mind — the aesthetic framework of an EP that was, from the outset, conceived as something that would eventually find its place in the ISO50 visual language on stage.
Economic Architecture and Touring Sustainability
The 2025 touring cycle demonstrated something that was not universally obvious at the outset of the Infinite Health era: that a project operating in Tycho’s particular register — sophisticated instrumental-led electronic music, produced at a high level of fidelity, performed in mid-sized venues with significant production overhead — could sustain an international touring operation without recourse to either festival circuit dependency or arena-scale ticket revenue.
The mid-sized venue strategy that defined the 2025 routing — Billboard Live Osaka, Spotify O-EAST, KOKO, Melkweg, Foro Indie Rocks!, The Midway, The Independent — reflects a deliberate choice to prioritize audiovisual control over capacity. Each of these rooms represents a size range in which the ISO50 visual system and the audio production can be deployed at optimal parameters. The production overhead is significant — the Apollo/UAD-2 Live Rack alone represents a substantial capital investment, to say nothing of the lighting and projection infrastructure — but in rooms of the right scale, the investment-to-impact ratio justifies itself. The audience at a 500- to 2,000-capacity venue experiences the production at a level of immersive completeness that would be diluted in a larger room.
The 2026 forward schedule, already mapped out as the 2025 cycle concluded, suggests a continued evolution in this direction: boutique festival appearances, unique destination venues, shows designed around the specificity of the setting. The Caverns in Pelham, Tennessee — a venue where the show occurs inside a literal cave and fans camp in yurt villages — represents the logical extension of Hansen’s interest in “built environments” as compositional elements. FORM Arcosanti in Mayer, Arizona (scheduled for October 9, 2026) is a venue inside the experimental architecture of Paolo Soleri’s arcology project, a built environment that is itself a statement about the relationship between human habitation and natural landscape. The Mishawaka Amphitheatre in Bellvue, Colorado (moved from a June 2025 date to June 20, 2026) is an outdoor stage set beside a river in the Roosevelt National Forest.
These venues are not merely logistically convenient. They are chosen because the physical context is itself an instrument — because, for Hansen, the right environment for a Tycho performance is one where the architecture or the landscape does some of the aesthetic work that in a conventional venue would have to be accomplished entirely through production design.
Fortune Sound Club in Vancouver (May 8, 2026) and the Substation in Seattle (May 9, 2026) are DJ set dates — a format that Hansen has increasingly used as a complement to the full band show, allowing him to present a different kind of curatorial statement that draws from a wider sonic palette than the live set’s fixed architecture permits. The DJ set context had been present throughout the 2025 North American leg, including the late-night sets at Viva El Gonzo and the UKG-inflected programming in Denver, and the 2026 calendar suggests the DJ format will continue to occupy a structural role in the overall Tycho live offering rather than serving merely as an economically lighter touring mode.
High Vibe Fest at Fawnskin, California (June 21, 2026) and Shambhala Music Festival in Salmo, British Columbia (July 24, 2026) position the project within a festival circuit that overlaps meaningfully with the ecological and wellness themes of the Infinite Health era. Shambhala in particular — an annual four-day festival held on a private farm property in the mountains of southern British Columbia, operating on a no-corporate-sponsorship model and emphasizing artist and community autonomy — represents a festival philosophy that aligns with what Hansen has described as his attraction to environments where the commercial apparatus is subordinate to the experience being created.
The 2025 Cycle in Retrospect
What the 2025 touring year and the Where You Are EP together constitute is a comprehensive argument for the durability and adaptability of the Tycho project. The tour was, in purely logistical terms, the most geographically complex Hansen had undertaken — Japan, fifteen European and UK cities, Mexico, North America, summer festivals — navigated with a production that had been designed from the outset to maintain quality across a wide range of venue types and acoustic environments. The cancellation of the SeaBisco Alaska cruise was the one significant operational failure of the cycle, and even that failure was resolved cleanly: refunds processed by January 3, the disruption absorbed, the calendar restructured without lasting damage.
The Where You Are EP, for its part, added something to the catalog that the Infinite Health album had not fully provided: a sense of lateral expansion, of a creative period that was still generating new material rather than simply promoting existing work. The “Infinite Health” vocal rework in particular — the first time that treatment of the title track had been made available — gave listeners who had been living with the album for months a new angle of entry, a different emotional register through which to experience a piece they thought they already knew. The neon-noir visual identity signaled that Hansen was not simply extending Infinite Health but using the EP as an opportunity to move the aesthetic in a new direction, one that would presumably continue to develop in subsequent releases.
The 2025 cycle arrived with a specific self-understanding — as both a retrospective and a projection forward. The setlist at Foro Indie Rocks! on May 11, which moved from the just-released “Phantom” through “PBS” and “A Walk” to the encore reprises of “Apogee” and “Division,” staged that retrospective deliberately, as a dramatic arc. Hansen was not merely performing his catalog; he was arguing for its coherence — asserting that the project that had begun with those early sampler-based compositions in the mid-2000s and the project that was now traveling through fifteen European cities with a Minimoog and an Apollo/UAD-2 Live Rack were continuous expressions of the same underlying sensibility.
That argument, made night after night in rooms across three continents, is the defining achievement of the 2025 cycle — the demonstration, in real time, that Tycho’s twenty-year trajectory amounts to something more than a series of individually successful releases. It is a body of work with an internal logic, a set of values held consistently across changing formats and collaborators and technologies, an ongoing project of building sound environments in which audiences can locate themselves. The Where You Are EP, arriving at year’s end with its shifted visual language and its new vocal treatment, was the latest installment in that project — not a conclusion but a continuation, issued in the mode of optimism that the Infinite Health era had established as its governing condition.
What the 2025 cycle ultimately demonstrated was the degree to which Hansen has refined his understanding of what the Tycho project is for. The early catalog was made in isolation, a studio practice that happened to find an audience. The Dive era opened the practice up to live collaboration, to the specific energies that Zac Brown and Rory O’Connor brought into the room. The Weather era introduced another voice — Hannah Cottrell’s — and in doing so asked the audience to reconsider what they thought they knew about the project’s relationship to human presence. The Infinite Health era, with its explicit optimism and its year of international touring and its surprise EP and its neon-noir aesthetic pivot, amounts to a further expansion of what the project is willing to be.
The Chicago crowds who treated the Salt Shed like a cocktail party, the Denver dancers frustrated by the static rail audience, the Osaka attendees who received the show in reverential silence, the Mexico City crowd that brought the kind of energy that fans describe as definitional — all of these encounters were, in a sense, the same show. The music remained stable across these wildly different receptive environments because it was built to be stable, engineered to carry its emotional and aesthetic payload regardless of what the room gave back. That is the ultimate technical achievement of the 2025 tour: a production robust enough to succeed in fifteen different countries without losing what makes it specifically itself.
The Where You Are EP title is worth sitting with as a final interpretive gesture. The question the title poses — where you are — is not a statement of location but an inquiry into presence, into the kind of grounded attentiveness that Hansen has consistently cited as both the goal of the music and the precondition for experiencing it fully. Where are you, when this plays? What is the room, what is the light, what kind of listening are you doing? These are questions that the 2025 touring cycle raised in every venue it visited, and that the EP posed again, quietly, at year’s end.
The answer, of course, is different every time. That is what the project is built for.
Sources: Gemini Deep Research (April 2026); setlist.fm (Foro Indie Rocks!, Mexico City, May 11, 2025; Tycho average setlists 2025); Northern Transmissions; Tape Op Magazine; Soundtoys interview archive; Universal Audio/UAD production interview; Origin Effects artist interview; Blurred Culture; 303 Magazine; Soundsphere Magazine; Live4ever Media; Indieofilo; JamBase; Relix; Jambands.com; Equipboard; Reddit/r/Tycho (multiple threads); SMASH Japan; eplus Japan; anwar.mx (Mexico City review).