Scott Hansen has spent more than two decades navigating one of the harder problems in contemporary music promotion: how do you make a music video for music that has no words? The conventional answer — illustrate the lyrics, feature the performer, build a narrative around the song’s emotional content as declared in the text — is unavailable. The music says nothing in language. It says things in tone, in accumulation, in the quality of light that seems to come through the sound, but not in sentences the camera can simply follow. Hansen has described himself, in many contexts, as someone who thinks first in images. He trained as a graphic designer, spent years building a visual identity under the name ISO50, and arrived at music partly through the act of designing for it. For someone who works this way, you might expect moving images to come easily. The reality is that each era of visual production represents a different solution to the same unsolvable problem, and some of those solutions rank among the most technically ambitious music videos ever produced for an independent artist.
What follows is the fullest account yet assembled of every music video, visualizer, live performance film, and significant promotional visual in the Tycho catalog — who made it, how it was made, what it cost in ambition and complexity, how it was received, and what it reveals about the project’s evolving understanding of what sound and image can do to each other.
The Philosophy: Instrumental Music and the Open Field
Before any specific video can be understood, the fundamental challenge needs to be stated clearly. When a piece of music has lyrics, a video director has a text to work from — something to illustrate, subvert, parallel, or contradict. The director and the music are in a conversation. When the music is purely instrumental, the director faces what Hansen has called an “open field”: the music will support almost any visual approach, which means the director must decide, without the guidance of language, what the music is actually about.
This openness is simultaneously a liberation and a difficulty. Hansen has exploited it in different ways at different points in the catalog — sometimes by building self-contained visual narratives that have their own logic independent of the music, sometimes by refusing narrative entirely and letting abstract visual environments serve as sensory parallels to the sonic one, sometimes by allowing live performance documents to stand in for formal videos. There is no single Tycho approach to the music video format. There are multiple approaches, each calibrated to the specific demands of the track, the era, and the production resources available.
What is consistent across the entire catalog is the foundational ISO50 aesthetic: warm, slightly degraded color palettes referencing 1970s analog photography, geometric forms (circles, trapezoids, sun discs) that carry a metaphorical weight about human life and its cycles, a bias toward natural environments rendered through photographic and cinematic techniques that make them feel simultaneously immediate and remembered. Hansen has described this dual quality — digital technology deployed in service of analog warmth — as the central formal principle of both his audio and visual work. The music is made on analog synthesizers and layered with careful digital production. The videos are shot on digital cinema cameras and processed to feel like they were shot on film. The gap between the technology used and the experience produced is, in both cases, the point.
2002–2010: The Science of Patterns Era and Early Visualizers
The visual work of the earliest period is almost entirely the work of a single person working alone. Scott Hansen, operating as ISO50, produced the animated and graphic visualizers that accompanied the initial catalog releases — a body of work that was less “music video” in any conventional sense and more an extension of the design practice into motion.
The retroactively formalized visualizer for “The Science of Patterns,” the 2002 EP track that initiated the catalog, runs to a remarkable 36 minutes and 4 seconds. The extended runtime signals something important: this is not a promotional piece designed for a specific platform or attention span. It is an ambient visual document, something to experience at the same pace you would experience the music itself. Uploaded officially to digital platforms in the years after initial release, the visualizer has accumulated over 2.4 million views — a number that reflects the discovery-engine function of YouTube more than any conventional music video promotion logic. People found it and stayed with it because it does what the music does: creates a space rather than a narrative.
The format Hansen was working in during this period — stark geometric shapes, simulated film grain, carefully selected vintage color fields, deliberate typography — directly mirrored the design work he was doing contemporaneously on the ISO50 blog. The motifs established here, most centrally the sun disc and the circle, would persist through every subsequent era of visual work. The sun disc as the life-giver. The circle as the closed loop of human experience. These are not arbitrary symbols; they are the foundational vocabulary of a visual system that Hansen built with the same deliberateness he brought to the sonic one.
The 2005 visualizer for “Dictaphone’s Lament” (5:11), another piece from the Sunrise Projector / Past is Prologue era, operates within the same vocabulary at a more focused duration. Its 389,000 view count, accrued over many years, reflects the long tail of discovery that characterizes the early catalog: listeners who found Dive or Awake and went backward through the discography, arriving at these early pieces with a visual context that made the formal simplicity feel like purity rather than limitation.
What the early visualizers establish, and what later productions would return to consistently, is the principle that visual accompaniment for instrumental music need not tell a story. It needs to create a world. The world is the ISO50 world: analog warmth, geometric clarity, the suggestion of vast natural space within a rigidly designed frame. Every subsequent video, from the GMUNK production of “See” to the Tokyo streets of “Infinite Health,” is a variation on this foundational visual world rather than a departure from it.
2011–2013: Dive and the “Live Visuals” Formation
“Ascension” (2012) — Director: Charles Bergquist
The production that established the Tycho visual grammar for everything that followed appeared with Dive in 2012. Charles Bergquist, a director and cinematographer whose aesthetic sensibilities were already strongly aligned with Hansen’s ISO50 work, shot the “Ascension” visual using a combination of camera systems — Red Epic-X, Canon 5D, and Olympus iSpeed 3 — operated with assistance from Brian Williamson. The multi-camera setup was not extravagance but precision: each format contributed different qualities to a visual language that required both resolution and a particular kind of physical softness.
The piece was deliberately billed not as a music video but as “Live Visuals.” This was a genuine conceptual position. Hansen was building something that functioned as an environmental extension of the music — a moving translation of the ISO50 aesthetic into cinematic form — rather than a promotional narrative. The female subject, Anna Martin, styled by Katrina Adair, moved through extreme slow-motion coastal environments that were never identified as specific places and never narrated as events. She was presence, not character. The landscape was the emotional content, not the background.
Extreme slow motion. Saturated color grading referencing 1970s film stock. Natural elements — ocean, sunlight, coastal silhouettes — rendered into something between documentary and dream. The practical technique that made all of this possible was the same as Hansen’s design technique: the deliberate application of an analog, textured, aged quality over clean digital foundations. In design, this was a layer applied in Photoshop. In cinematography, it was color grading by Bergquist that compressed the highlights, lifted the shadows, and shifted the whole toward the warm amber-gold tones of a specific decade of film photography.
The result accumulated nearly one million views — an extraordinary number for a Ghostly International release that deliberately refused narrative hooks. It proved two things simultaneously: that an audience existed for the Tycho visual world expressed through cinema, and that the visual world did not need to explain itself to hold that audience.
“A Walk”: The Non-Video
“A Walk,” which would go on to become one of the most widely heard tracks in the catalog with over 30 million streams across platforms, never received a dedicated narrative music video during the Dive era. Its visual life was built instead through live performance documents and strategic media placements — most notably its inclusion in the soundtrack for the 2014 PlayStation game Hohokum, which aligned the track with a vibrant, exploratory visual world and deepened its association with the experience of moving through space. A 16mm-influenced animated visual was later produced, combining physical and digital mediums in a way that referenced the track’s warm analog quality.
The most significant visual document of “A Walk” from the Dive era came through the KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic session, hosted by Chris Douridas. This performance captured the transitional moment when Tycho was becoming a live band rather than a solo producer’s project. A documented musical slip during the performance became a point of enduring warmth among fans — evidence that the music was being made by people who existed in time and could make mistakes. A 2024 Salt Shed live recording (5:17, 18K views), directed by Kyle Jetter with camera work by Chris Owsiany and Alec Basse, documented the same track a decade later against the backdrop of towering LED walls running synced ISO50 animations, the technological ambition of the live visual production having expanded massively over the intervening years.
“Dive” — Dance Film (2017, retroactively)
The licensed use of the title track “Dive” in a 2017 conceptual dance film directed by Charlie Stellar and choreographed by Haley Wilson is worth noting as an example of the music generating visual work that Hansen did not commission but found consistent with the project’s aesthetic values. The 5:14 film was officially selected for the San Francisco Dance Film Festival — an external validation, from a prestigious curatorial context, that the music’s open field of emotional resonance could support genuinely ambitious visual interpretation by artists working independently of the project’s creative direction.
2014–2015: The Awake Campaign and the Dual-Spectrum Revolution
“See” (2014) — Director: Bradley G. Munkowitz (GMUNK)
The video for “See,” released in May 2014 to introduce the Awake album, remains the most technically sophisticated production in the Tycho catalog and one of the most elaborately engineered music videos produced for any independent artist in any format. It won the Webby Award for Experimental and Weird in 2014. It generated extensive press coverage from The Creator’s Project, Motionographer, Promo News, and Laughing Squid — outlets that covered it as a filmmaking achievement, not merely as a music promotion. It has accumulated over 292,000 views on Ghostly International’s official channel, with additional viewership through GMUNK’s own platforms. The standalone Performance Cut, edited by Cyrus Tabar and featuring exclusively the Kinect-informed infrared footage of the band, added further viewership with its own distinct audience.
Bradley G. Munkowitz — known professionally as GMUNK, whose client roster includes Apple, Google, and the visual effects of Tron: Legacy — was the director. His conception for the video went far beyond any conventional approach to the instrumental music video challenge. Rather than finding a narrative that the music could support, he designed a narrative about perception itself — a story in which the central dramatic question is how we see, and in which the two states of human perception are made visually legible through two distinct camera systems operating on different parts of the light spectrum.
The Concept. The video follows a female protagonist, played by Hannah Helena Bjørnø, who awakens three times in the same physical posture in entirely different Northern California locations: the towering redwood forests of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the golden fields of Año Nuevo, and the rugged coastline of San Gregorio beach. She pursues an enigmatic male figure, played by Eone Darke n’ Cray, who materializes from the natural world itself. At the climax, the stranger embraces her and draws her back into ordinary perception, resetting the phenomenological loop. The narrative, taken on its own, is not unusual. What makes the video extraordinary is the technical system designed to show the difference between ordinary perception and the heightened, visionary state the protagonist moves through.
The Camera Systems. Director of Photography Joe Picard executed the most technically demanding cinematographic decision in the catalog: two separate camera packages, each used to depict a different reality. For the “audience” perspective — ordinary perception as the viewer experiences it — Picard used a standard RED Epic cinema camera paired with de-coated Zeiss super-speed standard prime lenses. The deliberate removal of anti-reflective lens coatings from modern precision-engineered glass is a counterintuitive choice with specific consequences: it introduces aggressive flaring, produces ghosting artifacts, reduces micro-contrast, and softens the image in ways that modern lens design is specifically engineered to prevent. The result aligns the digital sensor’s technically perfect capture with the physically imperfect, nostalgic quality of the ISO50 aesthetic — the optical equivalent of running an analog synthesizer through a clean digital recording chain and then deliberately warming the result.
For the protagonist’s heightened “POV” — the visionary state in which she perceives something the audience cannot — Picard used a custom-modified RED Epic with full-spectrum infrared capability and saturated black-and-white era filters. Infrared photography renders organic matter differently from visible-light photography: leaves become white, skies darken toward near-black, skin tones shift toward a luminous pallor. The Northern California landscapes that appear warm and beautiful in the ordinary-perception footage become alien and overwhelming in the infrared footage. The same environments, photographed simultaneously by two cameras separated only by spectrum, look like entirely different worlds.
Picard, supported in the field by 1st Camera Assistant Magaera Stephens and 2nd Camera Assistant Dakota Wilder Smith, with lighting and grip managed by Tej Verde and Patrick Walsh, was navigating a production system with no precedent in music video history. The practical and technical challenges of synchronizing two different camera packages with different optical characteristics across multiple locations were significant. The conceptual payoff — that the same physical world looks profoundly different depending on how you are equipped to perceive it — was precisely what GMUNK needed for the video’s thematic content.
The Band Performance Footage. The Kinect-based performance sequences pushed the technical ambition further still. Tycho was filmed in total darkness using an array of Microsoft Kinect sensors emitting infrared dot patterns, creating dense moiré textures and caustic light inversions on the performers’ bodies. Picard described operating in this environment as resembling a real manifestation of virtual reality: the set was entirely black save for a single red laser, and band members could not see one another. The resulting footage has a rawness and genuine disorientation — the band looked lost inside their own music, which turned out to be precisely the right visual register for a track called “See” that is about the limits of perception.
Practical Effects. The SFX and prop design were handled by Conor Grebel and Mike Williams, operating out of the Autofuss wood shop. They designed and manufactured physical geometric wooden props — direct three-dimensional manifestations of Tycho’s visual vocabulary — embedded with internal LED circuitry and laser-engraved runic patterns that came to life when viewed through the infrared system. The practical techniques they deployed went further: projecting video through laser-cut acrylic shapes, burning steel wool inside chrome tubes amidst heavy atmospheric haze, triggering chemical reactions to generate circle and triangle motifs in-camera. Additional circuitry was designed by Marek Michalowski. Executive Producer Michael Stanish and Line Producer Andrew Devansky at Ground Control UK managed the logistical and financial infrastructure of the entire production.
Post-Production. The color grade was executed by Matt “Prince Wesley” Hare at the post facility Glassworks UK, in collaboration with Flame artist James MacLachlan. The technical challenge of grading the infrared footage — raw spectrum data that does not map onto any conventional color space — required extreme channel manipulation and custom processing to arrive at the surreal, physically impossible color combinations that characterize the protagonist’s heightened-perception sequences. The grade needed to make those sequences feel both alien and organic, otherworldly and somehow true to the landscape that generated them.
The “See” video’s significance for the Tycho catalog extends beyond its technical achievement. It demonstrated that the absence of lyrics was not a limitation on visual ambition but potentially a source of greater freedom: without a vocal narrative to illustrate, the director could build an entirely self-contained visual world governed by its own perceptual logic. The music became the emotional architecture within which the film operated, rather than a text the film was obligated to depict.
“Montana” (2014) — Director: Charles Bergquist
Where “See” was narrative, technically labyrinthine, and conceptually elaborated, the video for “Montana” directed by Charles Bergquist operated at the opposite formal register: pure kinetic abstraction over nearly six minutes, shimmering geometries and percussive animations matched to the track’s driving rhythm without any pretense of narrative whatsoever. The view count — approximately 1.7 million on official channels — demonstrated that the abstract visual format had a substantial popular audience when the formal execution was strong enough to hold attention at feature length.
Hansen has noted that the visual strategy for the Awake campaign underwent a deliberate shift halfway through: the first half was predominantly light, airy, and sun-drenched, while the second half intentionally moved into significantly darker visual territory. “Montana” sits at this hinge — its geometry sharper, its rhythmic drive more aggressive, its emotional register less pastoral than “See” despite the two pieces being siblings in the same campaign. The Bergquist-directed “Montana” official KCRW live iteration runs 5:47 and accumulated over 163,000 views on the Ghostly International channel.
The coexistence of “See” and “Montana” in the same album cycle is itself instructive. Hansen was not committed to any single mode of visual accompaniment. The dramatic, narrative, technically elaborate approach of “See” and the pure formal abstraction of “Montana” could both serve the same body of music without either seeming incongruous, because the music itself was large enough — formally ambiguous enough — to support both.
KCRW and KEXP: The Performance Document as Visual Statement
Among the most-watched pieces in the Tycho visual catalog are live performance documents that were never conceived as music videos but that function as such in the discovery economy. The 2013 performance of “Awake” live on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic has accumulated over 176,000 views. The KCRW performance of “Montana” (5:47) followed with 144,000 views. But the most significant of these documents is the KEXP session filmed in Seattle in August 2014.
The four-song KEXP performance — “Awake,” “Spectre,” “L,” and “A Walk,” engineered by Kevin Suggs — has accumulated over 2.8 million views across its lifetime. The standalone performance of “Awake” from this session reached 355,000 views; the performance of “L” reached 139,000. Many viewers encountered these videos as their first experience of Tycho as a live band rather than a studio project, and the discovery was often startling: the music they associated with headphones and solitude was being produced, in real time, by four people playing instruments in a room. The studio track “L,” uploaded via Ghostly, became a catalog titan at over 1.3 million views. The Boiler Room San Francisco live set (1:12:17) holds over 530,000 views.
2016–2018: Epoch and the Architecture of Restraint
“Glider” (2017)
The Epoch era’s visual strategy was a deliberate chiseling away of maximalist complexity. Hansen conceptualized Epoch as a point of realization — the hinge of the Dive-Awake-Epoch trilogy — where the linear trajectory of the first two albums could be bent through conscious choice. The visual language followed: fewer elements, stronger forms, a return to the circle and the trapezoid as the primary vocabulary. The “Glider” video, released in tandem with European tour announcements, aligned with Epoch’s darker, more compressed palette. Director credit for the Epoch visualizers is associated with Rafael Anton Irisarri in collaboration with ISO50, reflecting the continued practice of bringing in visual collaborators whose sensibilities already occupied adjacent aesthetic territory.
“Horizon” (2017) — Director: Neil Krug and Charles Bergquist
The visual treatment for “Horizon” inverted the conventional relationship between music video and live performance. Rather than producing a studio video that would later inform the live show, the “Horizon” visuals were designed primarily for the live environment and debuted as the massive backdrop for Tycho’s performance at Coachella on April 15, 2017. The YouTube document of these visuals accumulated approximately 746,000 views.
Neil Krug — whose career includes work with vintage film emulation, saturated pulp aesthetics, and a consistent preoccupation with the American West — contributed original animations that combined his own visual sensibility with Charles Bergquist’s cinematography of the desert Southwest. Krug’s involvement illustrates Hansen’s curatorial method for selecting visual collaborators: he consistently chose directors and artists whose pre-existing aesthetic work was already in conversation with the ISO50 visual world, rather than briefing collaborators toward a specific predetermined look. Krug’s saturation-heavy, landscape-focused, slightly apocalyptic visual sensibility required minimal adjustment to function within the Tycho frame.
The resulting visuals were harsh, arid desert landscape rendered simultaneously desolate and luminous — the visual correlate of what happens when you strip a musical arrangement to its most essential elements and find that simplicity has its own grandeur. The “Horizon” video that circulated online was therefore something unusual: a document of a live visual experience, translated to the screen, retaining the character of something designed for projection at architectural scale rather than for personal viewing. The visuals work better at seventy feet wide than on a laptop screen, which was itself a design decision. Hansen and his collaborators were making something for the room first.
The “Epoch” title track upload separately accumulated over 571,000 views, making the period one of the stronger-performing eras in the catalog despite the relative restraint of its visual ambition.
“Division” at Red Rocks
The live performance video of “Division” filmed at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, while not widely viewed (approximately 118,000 plays), is one of the most important visual records in the catalog for a specific reason: it documents what happens when the ISO50 visual language is projected onto actual geological formations. The synthetic shapes that Hansen had developed over more than a decade — circles, trapezoids, sun imagery, clean geometric overlays — appear against the rough red-brown sandstone of Red Rocks in a dialogue between human mark-making and geological time that a conventional concert film cannot produce. The meeting of the digital and the ancient creates something that feels genuinely significant rather than merely technically impressive.
2019–2022: Weather, the Human Face, and the Creative Director Credit
“Pink & Blue” (2019) — Director: Chloe Corner
The release of Weather in 2019, with vocalist Hannah Cottrell (performing as Saint Sinner) at the center, required the most fundamental rethinking of Tycho’s visual language in the project’s history. For the first time, there was a specific human being in the music — a voice with a face, an emotional register expressed in language rather than in synthesizer tone and guitar texture. The camera suddenly had a subject in the conventional sense.
The video for “Pink & Blue” was directed by Chloe Corner, produced by Rhodes Pictures (executive producers Chloe Corner and Jayne Roberts), with Director of Photography Justin Hamilton, Production Designer Daniel Fox, VFX by Charles Bergquist, color grading by Asa Fox, and styling by Chloe Roessell. Hansen took the explicit credit of Creative Director — a distinction that matters and should not be read as decorative. Corner controlled the camera, the staging, the performance of Cottrell, and the edit. Hansen controlled the visual identity: the color palette, the relationship between the imagery and the broader ISO50 aesthetic, the overall tonal direction of what the piece should feel like.
This division of creative authority reflects an honest accounting of where Hansen’s skills and instincts are most and least applicable. His background as a designer and photographer equipped him with deep instincts about color, composition, and mood, but not with a film director’s instincts about human performance, blocking, and the movement of a camera through time. Directing a vocalist delivering a performance requires different knowledge from composing a landscape photograph. The Creative Director credit is a structural solution to this mismatch: Hansen could specify the world the video should inhabit; Corner could direct the person moving through it.
The visual content of “Pink & Blue” was a profound departure from everything preceding it: intimate domestic spaces, a bedroom, a hallway, outdoor jogging paths, lit in alternating washes of deep pink and stark blue that referenced the track’s title and Cottrell’s lyrical subject matter — a reflection on her adolescence and the discovery of her bisexuality, the pink and blue literally representing the fluidity of gender and sexual attraction in cinematic lighting. The ISO50 aesthetic, previously applied to coastlines and redwood forests and abstract geometries, was now being applied to a body in a domestic interior. The result proved the aesthetic’s flexibility. The warm color science and the particular quality of light survived the change of setting.
“Japan” (2019) — Director: Charles Bergquist
Hansen wrote the core progression of “Japan” after returning from Hakone and sent the instrumental to Cottrell with only the title as a conceptual prompt for her lyrical response. The video — directed by Bergquist as Creative Director Scott Hansen, produced by Daniel Obzejta, with Brian Williamson operating a MoVI stabilization rig — was shot on location in San Francisco’s Japantown neighborhood, treating the urban neighborhood as both setting and subject.
The MoVI rig was the visual key: the floating, fluid camera movement it produced, moving through Japantown’s streets and shopfronts as if suspended slightly above ordinary ground, created the specific quality of drift and attention that the music requires. The video functioned as something between a music video and a documentary about place — the camera moved through Japantown treating the neighborhood as a visual essay on the layered geographical and cultural references embedded in the song itself.
Because “Japan” was released in both vocal and instrumental versions, the video also raised an implicit question about perception: how does having access to lyrics change the emotional experience of the underlying composition? The video served both versions simultaneously, sitting productively at the boundary between music with and without language.
“No Stress” (2020) — Director: Chloe Corner
Corner returned to direct “No Stress,” the second Weather-era video featuring Cottrell, maintaining the visual register of human-centered intimacy established on “Pink & Blue.” The Creative Director credit remained Hansen’s. The consistency of the working arrangement across both Corner-directed videos — and across the Bergquist-directed “Japan” — indicated that the model was functioning as intended: Hansen could specify the visual territory, and his directors could realize it.
“Weather” — Animated Video — Director: Mathijs Luijten
The animated video for “Weather” stands apart from every other piece in the catalog by virtue of medium: it is entirely hand-drawn and computer-animated, with story, design, and animation by Mathijs Luijten and color and additional design by Yeojin Shin. Luijten’s concept grew from his personal practice of listening to Tycho during airplane takeoffs — he wanted to illustrate the “time capsule” feeling of flight, the liminal quality of being suspended between departure and arrival in a space where ordinary time seems to stop.
The visual style was directly and explicitly ISO50 in its formal approach: flat vector-based illustrations operating in three-dimensional space, sharp horizon lines, muted pastel gradients, the use of negative space as an active compositional element. Luijten’s work did not merely reference the ISO50 aesthetic from a distance but actually entered its formal vocabulary, translating Hansen’s still-image design language into animation with unusual fidelity. The video was particularly well-received within the motion design and graphic arts community, which recognized it as both an accurate rendering of the Tycho visual world and a successful solution to a difficult formal challenge: animating in a style defined by its stillness.
“Run Away” (2020) — Featuring rum.gold
Released during the pandemic period, the video for “Run Away,” featuring vocalist rum.gold, introduced the first male vocalist in a Tycho video and demonstrated the project’s adaptability to a fully remote production context. With Hansen in San Francisco and rum.gold in Brooklyn, the collaboration required visual approaches that could bridge geographical distance without the seams showing. The constraints of pandemic production reduced the visual ambition relative to the earlier Weather-era videos, but the human-centered emotional register the era had established was maintained.
“Only Love” (2021) — Featuring Benjamin Gibbard
The 2021 collaboration “Only Love,” featuring Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service, mixed by frequent collaborator Count and subsequently remixed by Oakland duo Brijean, extended the Mom+Pop vocal era’s reach into the broader landscape of indie rock. The visual documentation of this collaboration connected Tycho to a different audience lineage — the Death Cab / Postal Service diaspora — while maintaining the visual vocabulary Hansen had established through the Weather campaign.
2023–2026: Infinite Health and the Full-Spectrum Return
“Time To Run” (2023) — Director: Patrick Elmore
The lead single from Infinite Health, released in July 2023, produced the most directly autobiographical music video in the Tycho catalog. Director Patrick Elmore, who also served as his own director of photography, built the production around a competitive cross-country running narrative rooted explicitly in Hansen’s personal history as a distance runner during his youth in Fair Oaks, near Sacramento.
Produced by Wiley Hopkins and Carla Mardesich, with 1st AC Charlie Knott and final color grade by Zack Chalmers, the video starred Cashton Tate Rehklau as the primary runner, supported by Aidan Leclaire, Joshua Chiosi, Grant Gobell, Eddie Shamus Album Shen, Dana Dolvin, Beau Bown, and Grizzly Grimes in a full cast. Elmore’s cinematography made a formal argument through its two contrasting visual registers: stabilized, slow-motion tracking shots during the race sequences — structured, exhausted, pressurized — versus raw, handheld camera in the woods when the runner breaks away from the course. The transition between these modes was not just a stylistic choice but a statement about the relationship between external expectation and internal freedom, between the race as institution and running as embodied experience.
Chalmers’ color grade favored earthy, muted, naturalistic tones — the opposite of the heightened, processed quality of the “See” era. The woodlands were allowed to look like woodlands. The light was allowed to behave like actual outdoor light. This restraint was appropriate to a track that is, at its core, about finding peace in simplicity and movement rather than in spectacle.
Elmore has spoken about the specific directorial challenge the video presented: making the transition from structured competition to wild freedom feel earned rather than imposed. A music video for an instrumental track has no lyrical arc to follow, so the emotional transition needed to come entirely from the physical reality of the performance and the cinematographic choices made around it. The solution was to root the arc in genuine physical experience — competitive running as a form of emotional labor — giving the transition credibility without words.
“Phantom” (2023) — Director: Scott Hansen
The video for “Phantom,” announced as the lead single for Infinite Health (the album was ultimately released in August 2024), marks the most complete expression of creative self-sufficiency in the catalog. Hansen took direct control as director and editor, working with animator Ricardo B. Ponce — known digitally as @pixel.flux — to construct a neon-noir visual meditation on an unnamed shifting presence. The video runs 4:44 and has accumulated approximately 168,000 views.
Hansen described the conceptual center of the video explicitly: “I wanted it to feel like a blend of lights in a nightclub with some unknown entity. The phantom; a moving and shifting intelligence that serves as a conduit, maybe a deeper understanding of what’s beneath the surface of this all.” Ponce’s animations are iridescent, 80s-influenced, and deliberately abstracted — the phantom has no defined form, only shifting light patterns and implied motion. The visual reference to nightclub lighting is literal and functional: color pulses in rhythms that correlate to the track’s drum programming, the synchronized relationship between sound transient and visual response tight enough to feel designed rather than merely edited.
The decision to direct and edit the video himself represents Hansen solving the translation problem differently. When the gap between his visual conception and what an external director can realize through a briefing process becomes too large — when what he wants is specific enough that translation introduces more error than it resolves — the most efficient path is to eliminate the translation step. Working with animation rather than live action also circumvents the specific limitation Hansen has acknowledged: his design and photographic background equips him to compose and process visual elements, not to direct human performers. Animation requires the compositional and design thinking his background trained him for, and no performers need directing.
The synchronization between Ponce’s animations and the track’s micro-transients in “Phantom” is one of the most precise examples of audio-visual alignment in the catalog — achievable precisely because the person building the edit also produced the music and knows exactly where each transient falls.
“Green” (2024) — Director: Charles Bergquist
The long collaboration between Hansen and Bergquist reaches its most intimate and personally direct expression in the video for “Green.” Shot on the American River in California — the specific stretch of river near Fair Oaks, Sacramento that Hansen grew up around — the video documents the simple, ordinary experience of rafting on a summer day: the light on the water, the movement of the current, the quality of heat and coolness that characterizes a river in summer. Hansen described making “Green” in part as a way of being in a place he feared he had left behind — the video as return, as elegy, as record of a particular kind of belonging.
Bergquist’s steady, respectful camera does not attempt to make the river look dramatic or cinematic in any heightened sense. The American River is beautiful and ordinary in equal measure: not the monumental Northern California of the Big Basin redwoods or the atmospheric coastline of the “See” video, but the everyday natural world that children inhabit without knowing they will miss it. Visual restraint was the argument: memory looks like this, and it does not require enhancement. With approximately 170,000 views, “Green” is not among the most widely watched pieces in the catalog, but it may be the most emotionally direct — the video in which the distance between the music’s creative origin and its visual representation is smallest.
“Infinite Health” — Title Track (2024) — Director: Jamie-James Medina
The most ambitious production of the Infinite Health era by every measure — crew scale, geographic scope, production complexity, and budget — was the video for the album title track, released in August 2024. Director Jamie-James Medina (whose résumé includes work with The xx, FKA Twigs, and SAMPHA) brought a level of international cinematic scale to the production that the catalog had not previously reached. Executive Producer Dan Kent managed the production architecture; Yoshikazu Takano produced on the ground; Mari Asada served as Associate Producer.
The shoot took place entirely on location across Tokyo and Saitama, Japan, requiring a full multi-departmental crew assembled from local Japanese production infrastructure. Cinematography was executed by Director of Photography Hyogo Mitsuoka, supported by 1st AC Kite Muranaka and 2nd AC Kanoko Machii, with Gaffer Buchi leading the lighting team alongside Assistants Abe Ryosuke, Seiyo Nakahara, and Sayo Bapst. Production design was helmed by Yudai Sunagawa with Assistant Yuka Arai. Wardrobe was styled by Shinichi Mita, assisted by Chiharu Hata, Naoto Sekine, Hiroki Nasuno, and Rinko Iwao, with Hair and Makeup by Jun Matsumoto. The shoot was managed by 1st AD Goro Ushijima, Supervisor Anna Braind Hashimoto, and Production Managers Terumasa Naraki and Keisuke Sugiyama. Local logistical support came from Groundriddim and Video Connection, with equipment from CRANK and ARC・SYSTEM.
The narrative starred Annie the Clumsy (of Apple TV+’s Sunny with Rashida Jones) as the lead, with Baolin as the Motorbike Driver and Naoki Takano as the Doctor. Post-production editorial was managed by Spencer Campbell at the renowned editorial company Final Cut, with Assistant Editor Jackie Tullie and Executive Producer (Editorial) Sarah Roebuck. VFX work was completed by Takashi Tiba and Yousuke Asada, CG Compositor Hisatoyo Taguchi, and 3DCG Artist Shinichi Endo. Final color grade was executed by Matt Osborne at Company3, produced by Shannen Troup. Audio post-production was finalized by Machine NY.
The video premiered on screens in Shibuya, Tokyo — a distribution context that reflected the production’s commitment to honoring its geographic setting rather than simply using Japan as an aesthetic backdrop. The dense urban visual typography of Tokyo, the neon signage and transit infrastructure and layered city life, functioned as the primary visual material rather than as picturesque framing for a foreign production. Osborne’s color grade at Company3 processed this footage through a palette consistent with the ISO50 visual world while honoring the specific chromatic character of the Tokyo environment — an integration of the catalog’s foundational visual language with a specific urban geography. The Japan connection running through Hansen’s recent work — his personal ties to the country through his wife’s family, the “Japan” single on Weather, the cultural reverence that runs through the Infinite Health album — here produced a full-scale production rather than a metaphor.
“Devices” (2024)
The official visualizer for “Devices” runs 5:11 and accumulated approximately 93,000 views. The piece stands in deliberate conceptual contrast to “Green”: where that video looks backward to childhood and natural memory, “Devices” reflects Hansen’s late-1990s move to downtown Sacramento and his discovery of electronic music — the moment when technology became not an obstacle to human experience but the specific medium through which he found access to the emotional life he was trying to articulate. The thematic concern with staying human amid technological distraction, which runs through Hansen’s ISO50 blog writing from the earliest years, here receives direct visual treatment.
“Boundary Rider” (2025) — Visualizer
The visualizer for “Boundary Rider,” a collaboration featuring Paul Banks of Interpol, runs 3:45 and accumulated over 118,000 views within its first six months. The piece carries weight beyond its view count by virtue of who is involved: Hansen has cited Interpol publicly as one of his most significant contemporary influences, and the visual accompaniment for a track featuring Banks’s distinctive baritone needed to honor both the Tycho visual world and the distinct emotional register that Banks’s voice introduces. The visualizer format — which does not attempt to impose narrative on the music but creates a consistent visual environment — allowed the sonic collaboration to receive visual treatment without either oversimplifying it or demanding a visual complexity the format cannot deliver.
“Forge” (2026) — Visualizer
The visualizer for “Forge,” released in early 2026 via Ninja Tune (3:49, approximately 95,000 views within a single month), represents the most recent entry in the visual catalog at time of writing. Its rapid initial accumulation suggests that the Ninja Tune distribution infrastructure — significantly larger than the Ghostly International or Mom+Pop channels that anchored earlier eras — has expanded the reach of even modest visual content.
The companion visualizer for “Outer Sunset” (4:11, 616K views) stands as one of the strongest performers among the Infinite Health-era visual catalog, its view count reflecting both the quality of the visual content and the strength of platform placement.
Live Performance Documents: The Broadcast Sessions
A substantial body of professionally filmed live performance content functions, in practical terms, as music video material — providing moving-image accompaniment to the music through the same discovery channels, serving the same promotional purposes, but doing something formal videos cannot: documenting the music as a social and physical event, a thing that happens in a room between musicians and an audience.
The Salt Shed live recordings from the 2024–2025 touring cycle represent the current state of Tycho’s live visual production. Filmed at The Salt Shed in Chicago in November 2024, the series includes performances of “PBS” (4:42, 13K views), “A Walk” (5:17, 18K views), “L” (4:21, 15K views), “Horizon” (4:18, 16K views), “Weather” (4:39, 11K views), and “Devices” (5:17, 35K views), directed by Kyle Jetter with camera work by Chris Owsiany and Alec Basse. An additional piece — “Infinite Health (feat. Cautious Clay) [Live Visuals]” (4:29, 24K views) — documents the raw stage visuals rather than the band performance, treating the touring visual system itself as the subject.
The behind-the-scenes documentary short detailing the making of Weather, directed, filmed, and edited by Scott Hansen himself and released in December 2019, provided unprecedented intimate insight into the studio sessions with Saint Sinner. It served as a critical EPK piece while also functioning as an honest record of how a fundamental creative shift happens inside a studio — the vocalist arriving, the instrumental music finding its human counterpart.
The Tycho Friendship Hour series, broadcast on Twitch and archived on YouTube, extended the behind-the-scenes impulse into long-form unscripted conversation. Episode 01 featured live drummer Rory O’Connor (Nitemoves) (8.4K views), Episode 02 featured Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation (4.2K views), and Episode 09 brought Nitemoves back (5.3K views). The “LUNA Minimoog Office Hours” session (1:15:53, 8.6K views) and a 2025 YouTube Short (2:53, 4.3K views) documenting the studio where Infinite Health was recorded serve as technical EPK material targeted at the audiophile and producer audience.
Production Scale and Budget: The Spectrum
The Tycho visual catalog spans an unusually wide range of production scales, and understanding this range clarifies how the project’s visual program has been managed across two decades. At the commercial end sits “See” — a production employing a full crew, specialized camera systems, custom fabricated props, a seasoned director with significant advertising credits, and post-production color grading at a major UK facility. GMUNK’s client list includes Apple and Google; Joe Picard’s technical work required systems built specifically for this production. The budget occupied a space comparable to mid-level commercial advertising, not independent music video production.
At the opposite end sits “Phantom” — Hansen directing himself, a single animator, no location, no crew, no cinematography. The budget is minimal; the visual coherence is high, because the constraint of the format is matched to the resources available for it. The difference between these two productions in terms of financial investment is enormous. The difference in aesthetic quality is much smaller, because each was sized correctly for its moment.
The mid-range — Bergquist’s landscape and natural-world productions, Corner’s human-centered Weather videos — involves professional crews and legitimate locations without requiring the specialized systems of the “See” production. These videos carry real production value without claiming the commercial-scale ambition of GMUNK’s work.
This calibration reflects a consistent intelligence about when production investment pays off. The “See” production was justified by its moment: Awake was the highest-profile Tycho release to date, the track was among the strongest on the album, and the visual work needed to function as a calling card to audiences who had not yet engaged with the project. The investment in technical sophistication was also an investment in credibility. The “Green” video was precisely right to be quiet and direct. A track built on personal memory and understated elegy needed Bergquist’s steady camera and the American River, not a specialized optical system.
Hansen’s Evolving Role: Designer, Creative Director, Director
The most illuminating structural pattern in the visual catalog is the evolution of Hansen’s own credited role across the eras. Early visualizers were entirely his work — animation, design, music, all one person. The Bergquist collaborations on Dive and Awake saw him effectively functioning as a very specific creative brief: he knew what the visual world should look and feel like, and Bergquist could execute it. GMUNK brought an autonomous creative vision that Hansen trusted enough to let run, but the conceptual alignment between dual-spectrum perceptual photography and the sonic philosophy of the analog-warmth project was not accidental — it was the product of a careful selection of a collaborator whose way of seeing was already compatible with the ISO50 frame.
The Creative Director credit on the Weather-era videos represents the most explicit acknowledgment of where Hansen’s authority appropriately lies. He is not a film director in the sense of having practiced the specific craft of directing human performance. He is a visual designer who can specify a world with unusual precision and who has developed, over twenty years, a rigidly coherent visual vocabulary. The Creative Director role formalized this: he could set the aesthetic terms, the collaborating director could realize them in the medium of film performance. Corner and Bergquist were not executing Hansen’s instructions; they were making decisions within a territory Hansen had mapped.
The decision to direct “Phantom” himself — using animation as the medium — resolved the tension elegantly. Animation is design in motion. It requires the compositional thinking, the color sense, the formal intelligence about relationships between shapes and light and time, that Hansen developed through years of graphic design practice. It does not require the specific craft knowledge of directing a human being in front of a camera. “Phantom” is the video in which Hansen is most completely himself as a filmmaker, precisely because he was working in a medium where his existing skills applied without translation.
The Visualizer Format: Honest Accompaniment
Running parallel to the formal music video throughout the catalog is a body of official visualizers — animated or motion-graphics-based pieces built from elements of the album artwork and the broader ISO50 visual vocabulary, synchronized to the full duration of a track. The production investment is lower than a live-action video; the visual ambition is typically more modest. For certain applications, this is not a compromise but a correct assessment.
For purely instrumental music, the visualizer has a specific functional advantage: it does not attempt to impose a narrative framework on music that was designed without one. A visualizer moving through ISO50 geometric forms and color fields while “Devices” or “Forge” plays is not making claims about what the music means. It is creating a visual environment that feels consistent with the sonic one — consistency without claim, which is actually well suited to the challenge of visualizing music that resists lyrical or narrative interpretation. The best Tycho visualizers feel less like budget compromises than like honest reflections on what visual accompaniment for this specific kind of music should actually be.
The Throughline
What the full catalog reveals, taken across more than two decades, is less a history of music video production than a history of a single aesthetic intelligence finding different ways to solve the same problem in different contexts. The problem is the same in 2002 and in 2026: how do you make images that honor music which refuses to be illustrated? The solutions range from 36-minute ambient loops to dual-spectrum infrared cinema to neon-noir animator collaborations to simple recordings of a river on a summer afternoon.
What they share is the ISO50 aesthetic, which by this point is large enough to contain all of them. The circle and the sun disc. The analog warmth deployed through digital means. The bias toward natural environments, toward light as subject rather than illumination tool, toward the feeling of being in space rather than the event of arriving somewhere. The catalog’s visual history is, in the end, the history of that feeling finding different forms of expression — sometimes at enormous technical expense, sometimes with nothing but Hansen, an animator, and a piece of music he knew better than anyone else could.
Related articles: music-video-complete-history.md covers the contextual narrative and discovery-engine role of key visual documents. music-videos-visual-production.md provides technical production details and the live visual architecture including stage systems and Burning Man sets. This article provides the per-video deep dive on directors, production credits, and Hansen’s philosophy.