Tycho - Epoch

The Guardian 40

(Ghostly International)

Nominations for the electronic music Grammy are generally awarded to the year’s least exciting electronic music, and so it proves with this instrumental outfit headed by Californian producer Scott Hansen, whose Epoch is in with a shout for the 2017 prize. Underpinned with Radiohead-style fidgety live drums and topped with arena-hopeful guitar lines, Hansen adds his own flavours – diluted Kompakt pulses, very occasional melodies – to create fussy math-prog, ambient trip-hop and other studies in inconsequence. Tracks like Glider and Local make a reasonable stab at Balearic psychedelia, but don’t inhale, and for all his aspirations to cosmic transcendence, Hansen keeps everything trapped in this dimension with his compressed and airless production. It’s all perfectly pleasant and thoroughly boring, and would make ideal backing music for a hot-air ballooning company’s next promotional video.