Blackstock: You’ve been to so many festivals. I heard about a unique set you did at Burning Man. You were playing at sunrise.
Hansen: Yeah, I go to Burning Man every year. I just like to go there. I always like to DJ. Sunrise is kind of the moment I feel my music makes the most sense.
McGugan: Absolutely.
Hansen: Yeah, last year was definitely the most fun. I ended up DJing so much it became like work. I’m going to scale back for next year.
Blackstock: It was a long set. You were still playing when they lit one of the statues?
Hansen: Oh yeah, that was just one morning. I played every morning or every day. So it was like a never-ending DJ set. That is just the one I posted online. I was happy with the moment and how all of it happened. The one that I posted online actually wasn’t a public one. My friend has a car with a system on it. We just went out during the Embrace Burn with just us and our close friends. So that’s why I felt that was really special. The other ones that were more public, those were cool too. But I wanted to post the one the people hadn’t heard.
Blackstock: So do you have more touring planned once the train pulls into the station?
Hansen: Yeah, we have a few things. I think South America is confirmed now. We’re doing Mexico City and just heading south into South America. We have some U.S. stuff: We’re doing Florida, a bunch of festivals. We’re actually going to be back here really soon for a festival in Tulsa.
McGugan: Center of the Universe Fest.
Hansen: I don’t know the final details, but we’ll be back soon.
Blackstock: All this constant touring, has there been any thought on what the next album would be or sound like?
Hansen: We were in Tahoe right before this trip. We had a month off, so we went to the same place we did [Awake], laid some stuff down and got some basic things going so when we came back we’d have something to work with. When we get back from this trip, I got like four weeks, so I’m going to dig in the studio and work through all the material we had. I want to have it done by late winter, early 2016.
Blackstock: So possibly a 2016 release?
Hansen: Yeah, don’t hold me to that. But my goal is to have something out in the summer of 2016.
Blackstock: Would the new album still take the live band approach? I know how you mentioned you were moving towards more natural instrumentation.
Hansen: I think we kind of found a good workflow with the way we did the last record. I want to try a few new things to break out and force it into some other directions we didn’t quite get to, because Awake was let’s take the sound created on Dive and bring other people into the equation and see what that does to it. A lot of the overhead of Awake was just learning the process and figuring out how to work together. I think that’s why it’s so short, because I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. I wanted to say, here’s the core of the sound we’re going for, and keep it tight, keep it focused. For the next one, I’m not sure what that means. Maybe there will be some other process I spend a lot of time on. But I definitely want to take that, refine it, and push it even further outside the scope of whatever influence Dive had on Awake.
Blackstock: So maybe a longer run time?
Hansen: I just mean different ideas and trying to force myself to use different instruments and maybe not use the same instruments in the same way.
McGugan: Getting out of your comfort zone? Trying to explore?
Hansen: Yeah, hopefully. We’ll see. You never know.
