Bob Hansen, the Seattle-based producer who sometimes records as Hanssen, spent the first decade of his career making dancefloor-oriented music that occupied a wide spectrum of playfulness. When working as part of the duo Jacob London, a collaboration with friend Dave Pezzner, Hansen focused on a goofy, skittering brand of house, stuffing EPs like Casual Bingo and Brown Alert with songs that sounded like Luomo after a classic funk YouTube binge. His first few EPs as Hanssen, released around the turn of the decade, remained within the realm of beat-driven electronic music, but with a much greater seriousness; glitch and gimmickry were largely replaced with an elemental bent, by songs that either sprouted sturdy rhythmic roots or fizzled into the sky. His debut full-length Seven Years Week marks another step away from zany, cluttered body music, but retains some of the imagination and quirk that made that work special.
The best contemporary analogue for the sounds Hansen is exploring on Seven Years Week is probably the work of groups like Emeralds—and the solo work of that band’s members, Mark McGuire and Steve Hauschildt—who make melodic, surprisingly dense ambient music. The genre’s lineage stretches back to German pioneers like Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream, groups that stretched the new technology behind synthesizers to its breaking point as the ‘60s morphed into the ‘70s, and that heritage is certainly identifiable in Hansen’s work. He spends much of Seven Years Week looking into the stars, whether through the cascading, echoing synth lines of “Solar America” or the more explicit titular homage of chugging closer “Lunar Sleep”. With that said, you get the sense that Hansen isn’t content just evoking the names of kosmische luminaries and calling it a day: he conducts a few experiments with texture and rhythm throughout the album, and the results are tracks that tend to linger once they’re finished. “Cholesterol” is a good example, built around a skittering, surprisingly nimble beat and a vocal sample that’s been sucked through an astral vacuum, and while Hansen eventually steers the song into more typical electronic terrain, it feels like it could’ve taken many different forms: downcast electro-pop, fodder for avant-garde rappers, a stretchy synth odyssey. He’s very good at inviting the listener to consider the wide range of possibilities that stem from a single beat or synth line, as if concepts are spilling out of his hyperactive brain and trickling down past the borders of his compositions.
Another one of Seven Years Week’s strengths is its brevity. Ambient and drone music sometimes can’t help but invite sprawl, with its slow-motion unfurling and occasional lack of focus, and there’s often a great deal of pleasure to be found in losing oneself to the slow, warm drift of a lone synth, floating through infinite space like the Voyager twins. Hansen refuses to give in to this impulse, and it shows in the album’s length: Seven Years Week only breaks the half-hour mark by a few minutes, and none of its eight tracks come close to cracking the six-minute mark. It occasionally works against him—there are a few tracks, like “Solar America” and “Everyday with Rachael”, that could easily double in length without arousing a complaint—but overall, it keeps the album clean and refreshing rather than messy and exhausting, a veteran move from a producer who’s continued to mature without becoming stiff or sedate.
