PARIS FRANKLIN; Culture Editor; franklpm@plu.edu
On Saturday, Sept. 24 sophomore Dietrich Hanson, the vocalist of Eleven Apo11os, released his first extended play album, “The Arrival.”
The five-track album was celebrated with a concert hosted at Northern Pacific Coffee Company. The shop was filled with students from Pacific Lutheran University and members of the Parkland community who were eager to witness Hanson’s unique blend of electronic, instrumental and rap music.
Hanson sings, raps and plays piano on “The Arrival.” Matthew Flaherty, the other half of the band, focuses on the electronic side of the music, recording, producing and mastering the tracks for the album. Flaherty, a student at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR, has been working with Hanson for the last nine years, but this past year proved difficult for the band.
“The sheer distance between Forest Grove and Tacoma is a little hard — we’re in a long distance musical relationship — but we’d definitely like to expand our market in the PLU vicinity,” Hanson said.
Hanson has been playing the guitar since the age of four, and he has learned additional instruments every few years since becoming comfortable with written music. He is a classically trained guitarist, as well as a talented pianist, bassist, drummer, rapper and vocalist.
In addition to his musical skills, Hanson is a driving force behind the management side of Eleven Apo11os.
As a business and marketing major, Hanson understands the importance of creating a brand to go with the art.
“I have used a lot of stuff that I have learned from my business classes,” Hanson said. He believes that many other music artists don’t have the best approach to gaining attention in the industry when they first start out.
“They focus on the art, but they don’t focus on distributing the product to the consumers,” Hanson said.
This is not to say, however, that Hanson hasn’t worked tirelessly to craft the music itself. “Tracks like ‘Spaceman’ I’ve been working on for about two years and just mulled it over in my head until it was perfect. If I am going to put it out there, I want it to be a product that I will be proud of,” Hanson said. “Other tracks li
ke ‘Ted Cruz Carpet Bombed Me’ I made the beat and from there, I would freestyle and write lyrics over it. The whole thing came together in about two days.”
The album itself is diverse, with each song lending itself to a different genre.
“What you can expect to hear from the album is a lot of Watsky-influenced rap where it’s very poetic, but it is over a lot of live instrumentation,” Hanson said. “It’s kind of grandiose beats where music comes first and then we incorporate the lyricism with it.”
“The Arrival” features tracks that range from heavy subjects such as drinking and mortality to tongue-in-cheek commentary about former politicians.
“I definitely didn’t intend it to be a catharsis towards tragedy, but people deal with crisis in a lot of different ways, and I think that if you can find beauty in some sort of support in the form of art, then more power to you,” Hanson said.
As far as his support system goes, Hanson is appreciative for his counterpart Eleven Apo11os, Flaherty, as well as fans of the band. “Matthew is the Ryan Lewis to my Macklemore,” said Hanson. “If it weren’t for the people who put faith in our music we would just be playing to an empty crowd,” Hanson said.
The fans “are just as much a part of Eleven Apo11os as me and Matthew are.”
