Sixty-two-year-old Hansen accordingly remains to be discovered as a significant Hamiltonian artist. He deserves credit for his prescient sensitivity to international art world currents, for instance, his forays into participatory art before it became widespread in the late 1990s under the umbrella term relational aesthetics, and his merger of art and rock music well before that trend was on the radar in the mid-aughts.
Participation through the tropes of rock music—the record, the DJ, the rock star, and the guitar—is Hansen’s modus operandi. As an experimental jazz musician and radio DJ (he hosted jazz and rock shows for the now defunct CKLN-FM, a non-profit radio station in Toronto, for over two decades), Hansen maintains an ongoing professional familiarity with these tropes. As a sound artist, he enlists them as familiar icons that he deconstructs to expose capitalism’s grip on music and, in turn, to reclaim collectivism through his audiences’ direct engagement with music and music-making.
To understand how Hansen uses contemporary music tropes to form his critique, it is worth looking at French social and economic theorist Jacques Attali, who analyzes in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, how recorded music became the main form of musical dissemination and listening, quickly resulting in the record album becoming a consumer good. As a consumer good, it allows for corporate interests to arrange or control social interactions through its distribution while it builds an illusion of freedom and empowerment: “Music has thus become a strategic consumption, an essential mode of sociality for all those who feel themselves powerless before the monologue of the great institutions.”3 Sugarcoating corporate domination with entertainment, the record album is a commodity fetish, “a consumable object,” Attali continues, “answering point by point to the lacks induced by industrial society.”4 Filling the void left by the alienation of industrial age consumer society with aesthetics, vinyl pacifies the public into accepting a seamless capitalist system. As a result, the record plus the symbiotically connected record player and DJ are ideal vehicles for reclaiming music from capitalism’s commodification.
Hansen’s use of vinyl as a sound art medium dates from 1992 and continues to his Hamilton studio where he recently produced a set of multiples titled Paradox (A Study in Musique Concréte), 2019, comprising playable records actually made of concrete, a hilariously direct visual pun of material on the avant-garde music movement, musique concréte.
