So we’ve made it to the guilt gnaws the very core of me post, except if I am to think it through, it’s not necessarily the guilt that propelled Tycho to the number 6 spot, but the actual strengths of a show that could not have closed a day (or started another one, depends how you look at it) better. Thing is, Tycho did have a club gig in Akvárium earlier this year, a club gig which, somewhat strangely if we are to map the general tastes of the Budapest concert crowd, sold out. This happened to be something I did not expect- I have mentioned this earlier, but maybe it’s age, maybe it’s laziness, maybe it’s a complete and somewhat deliberate disconnect with the general trend, but simply I cannot and frankly don’t even wish to predict what’s going to be sold out these days. If something is ridiculously dear to my heart, I’ll but the ticket on the first possible occasion, if not, I go with the flow of the universe and hope it works out alright.

I thus missed the Tycho Akvárium show, and I will admit I was not all that sorry about it, because prior to it I had listened to Tycho sporadically and found it alright, but not groundbreaking, earth shaking, mountain moving. Just alright. And a packed club concert for something which is only alright did not seem worth the hassle. But then, while I was doing alternative stuff, like writing random articles, filling excel sheets, pondering great decisions, meditating on the meaning of life in general, I realized I kept, almost instinctively, going back to Tycho.

It’s as if this music was both something I enjoyed deeply, but also found to be anodyne enough not to care about it. This situation intrigued me to no end- Tycho, I concluded, are like air. You don’t think about air, but it’s always there, and keeps you alive. You only notice it truly when it’s lacking- a week goes by, I don’ listen to them and then suddenly, without thinking about it, I click on one of their albums, because I must. The Sziget concert was thus the final lacking piece of evidence:  I soldiered on through a pointless gap after midnight just to make it to half past one, but when the concert started, I felt all the pieces of the puzzle falling into place.

It’s what you call ambient music- music that makes you feel that your environment, your surroundings, are alright, perhaps more than that, it’s that fraction of a second when you do feel aligned with all the planets, in spite of the fact that you’re actually only in a tent, on an island somewhere a bit off the centre of Budapest, capital of Hungary, Europe, planet Earth, on an August night which is pretty hot, pretty dusty, and you’re surrounded by strangers, plus the friend who soldiered on with you, but you have the feeling that after all everything ever will work out just fine. There’s nothing exaggerated in the delivery, nothing that would make you pay attention to that which is outside of you: sometimes less is more, or perhaps exactly enough and there’s no way to force grace, it will find you when you’re ready.