“Morale, like anything, is just another problem to be solved,” begins a chewy chapter in Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir about the author’s time spent working in the neo-capitalist Platonic cave of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley. Heavy with the weight of corporate hubris, unchecked male ambition, and free nut mix, Wiener’s writing is an otherwise zippy babe-in-the-(Muir)-woods account, partway between a tell-all and a long piece of gonzo journalism, describing the dawn of the start-up bubble. Aside from detailing the morally ugly and aesthetically corny consequences of the Valley’s quick rise to becoming a living diorama of late-stage gentrification, the thrill of the book lies in watching a mass cultural movement assume a near-spiritual reverence for work. This is work as eternal pursuit of validation, work as shorthand for identity, work as a means for self-actualization and self-escape—work as a (if not the) justification for being alive at all. “They talked about achieving flow,” writes Wiener of her superiors, who RipStik gently around the office while taking conference calls and making insulting amounts of money, “a sustained state of mental absorption and joyful focus, like a runner’s high.”

The idea of flow, a key tenet of corporate garbagespeak, is a fulcrum of the San Francisco-based musician Scott Hansen’s latest and most explicitly San Franciscan album, Simulcast. Operating under the Tycho banner, Hansen’s project—or, depending on your proximity to the creative class, entire brand identity—has become synonymous with a style of electronic patter so easily digestible that it approaches a degree of utility. Non-offensive, near-benign, and as if custom-built for the provocations of doing something else, Simulcast, like many Tycho works, is a reliably egoless experience, an art that approaches productivity-enhancing apparatus.

Part of the pleasure of determining the breadth and scale of an artist’s hugeness is in scouting where their music proliferates and who it’s for. In Tycho’s universe, there are listeners, and there are use-cases. He exists in perfect symbiosis with streaming services’ mood-based offerings: Whether on a bevy of ready-made playlists from Spotify (“Chilled Vibes,” “Atmospheric Calm”) or across hundreds of user-made playlists titled with terms like “chill,” “study,” or, beautifully, “Adderall,” Tycho’s music has reached a state of ubiquity for the way that it softens or amplifies the blows of a daily rhythm. Much like the inescapable 24/7 streams by a YouTube channel titled ChilledCow, who owns the “lofi hip-hop radio” multiverse, Tycho’s work makes its implicit purpose to support, sustain, or beautify a brainspace. “I like how this music accompanies your mood, rather than strongly impose some emotions,” reads a top-upvoted comment on a YouTube upload of 2011’s Dive, whose viewership currently clocks 33 million views.

But Tycho’s music lies just this side of the utter artistic facelessness baked into the “beats to relax/study to” or “beats to sleep/chill to” streams; there will always be a small fistful of flags that alert you to the fact that you’re experiencing a Tycho song. There will be soft exhalations, pillowy radar loopings, cottony breakbeats, and extremely liberal inspiration from Boards of Canada. There will be album art with high-contrast sunsets. There will be warm electro-acoustic mist. There will be tabletop synth patterning that bobs harmlessly up and down a scale.

Simulcast blankets all of these suggestives under a weighted duvet: The album is an instrumental companion to 2019’s Grammy-nominated Weather in which each track carries the satisfying airtightness of a meditation app with deluxe features. (Cannily, the album announcement for Weather was accompanied by a literal web app.) Simulcast—a portmanteau of “simultaneous” and “broadcast,” like a live feed of a presentation played on several screens across a multi-bureau organization, is actively inspired by Hansen’s three-fold vision to strip the vocals from his last album, find peace in a chaotic world, and honor San Francisco’s beaches. As a result, the whole thing is not unlike finding yourself transfixed by a desktop screensaver of an ocean.

The work provides brief moments of happy fizz that unquestionably belong to Hansen’s hand. Tracks crescendo and decrescendo with peak points at equidistance on nearly every track. “PCH,” named after the sinewy highway that crescents California, is like easy-listening IDM; “Alright,” with its dilating snare buildups, is post-rock-on-the-sea; “Stress,” whose title suggests the thing one is dodging, is a beautifully limp exercise in motivational drum progressions that seem calibrated for the cubicle. As Hansen notes on a post of his handmade artwork for the track, “if you’re going to be stuck in a room, might as well put up some nice wallpaper.”

That Tycho’s music functions as a mental masseuse for the 21st century open-office drone, or a mood stabilizer for the nervous, is a fundamentally benevolent thing. Hansen, who has spoken with gravity, candor, and self-awareness about his music as an aid—whether of concentration or attitude—offers, in his own way, a mildly noble service. Here, it’s difficult not to summon the mother of all sound-as-motivational-mechanisms—the much-maligned Muzak Corporation, founded in 1934—and their Stimulus Progression series: fifteen-minute tracks of background instrumentals meant to give the listener a boost of productivity over the course of an hour. Early emissions of Muzak were billed as “functional music,” responding to the need to “fill the deadly silences” of the office, there to drown out human complexity for the sake of getting something done.

But human complexity often demands volume. Simulcast, in contrast, could be confused for interstitial podcast filler tagged “uplifting” and “electronic.” It might be background music for prescription drug commercials or a public university’s sizzle reel; music to soundtrack health food emporia, CBD dispensaries, entire theatres of retail operations with target audiences of Instagram users between the ages of 20 and 35. Tycho suggests a host of signifiers that spool into one another like a lorem ipsum of a certain type of contemporary aesthetics: kaleidoscopes, foliage, triangles; hand-lettered typography, galaxy prints, stickered Nalgenes, new bars in newly named neighborhoods. These things are not inherently bad, but they proliferate, at this point, almost to a point of unmeaning. I fear—as Wiener writes of San Francisco, smoothed by all that flow—that it is “all beginning to look like a generic idea.”

Buy: Rough Trade

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