Tycho has just released two new tracks for streaming everywhere: “Japan” and “Japan” (Instrumental)! The version featuring vocals will come off the group’s upcoming LP, Weather, set to be released on Friday, July 12th, and there’s a bit of a surprise in this drop that I didn’t expect…
Scott Hansen shared this context behind the track on his social media page:
When I wrote this track I had just returned from spending some time in Hakone, Japan with my wife’s Japanese relatives. This was right around the time I was starting on this album and I was thinking a lot about the kinds of instruments and methods I had been using when I first started making music in the late ’90s. With ‘Japan,’ I was trying to recapture a part of that sound and combine it with the imagery and experiences from my time in the green forests of Hakone. Once I felt comfortable with the instrumental I sent the song to Hannah Cottrell / Saint Sinner with nothing more than the title of ‘Japan’ and she wrote all of the lyrics.
For this new record I get a sense that he’s really making a positive step forward with adding amazing vocals into some of his already impressive instrumental compositions, but just like any good project that gets notoriety taking a set approach, he’s also giving out these instrumentals along with the new vocal tracks as a way of still being like “I get it, you listen to me while you’re writing code or whatever…” and he’s taking away from of these new additional elements to strip back to his roots style. But that’s not really all, he’s still treating his instrumentals as slightly different approaches entirely (and so they’re different versions).
He goes on to say…
With this record I wanted to explore the idea of approaching each song from two totally different perspectives and so just like ‘Pink & Blue’, ‘Japan’ includes both a vocal and and instrumental version. The instrumentals aren’t simply versions with the vocals removed, they are totally new arrangements with different melodies and instrumentation. I hope you enjoy the results of this experiment!
Check out the tracks below or here.
