HANZ.

Hanz is an extremely talented electronic music producer based in North Carolina. He is a musician who constantly pushes boundaries and creates unique and challenging compositions. This year Hanz has released his third LP // ‘A Brief Guide’ // and it’s a totally tripped out album full of industrial noise, beautiful melodies, excellent beats, and sharp vocal samples. Hanz manipulates sounds masterfully giving each track a great sense of unpredictability. Listening to his music is like watching a movie with several story-lines unfolding simultaneously and eventually culminating and merging into one. - www.iamnotamusician.com via http://independentmusicnews.co.uk/

HANZ leaves his cobbled castle, held together by chipping cement, coldly-sweating stones, and the history of its seclusion. Resting in the basin of a nighttime forest, his lair demands the bodies of his victims, soon to be pieced together by his long needle of instrumental embroidery. Armed with his agility, a knack for tracking, and a shining blade, he sets off to claim his victims. And they should be honored : their disjointed bodies will shamble together a man’s audacious prowess and nature’s unwavering simplicity. A moonlit sky of shining warps, bright hi-hats, and shaken metals, HANZ’ cover is briefly interrupted every few paces as he charges forward. An insatiable hunger powered by dribbling drums, growling bass, and flittering subtleties, HANZ’ intensity is bound only by sharply-remembered calm. He collects bodies and settles at his table, ready to recite A BRIEF GUIDE.

HANZ drops his latest instrumental project A BRIEF GUIDE, owning all the production and the cover art on this badboy. It’s more of a soundtrack than an album. Tracking the mind of a mad hunter, harvesting prey for a Frankenstein-ed experiment. Constantly filling and asphyxiating sounds, HANZ drudges over their many forms, pursuing their capacity for revitalization. Cranking gears of sound together, he looks into music through an industrial wretch. Ignoring the barriers between tracks and the need to loop sounds for rhythm, HANZ is able to capture the sensations of pursuit, evasion, and ecstasy. Churning coldly-brewed sounds against organically-sprouted ones, he explores the separations between sound sources, finding rhythm in dissonance. Set some time aside for this. - CuttingPractice

Just when you thought you knew all ’bout Georgia…
As a collection, the tracks of A BRIEF GUIDE feel like a giant, yet indistinct mass, rolling forward phlegmatically. This breadth of sounds leaves a feeling of total abstraction – in that while you may roll alongside this work it is difficult to not get caught out by its persistent reconstructions.
Stupefying bass synthesizers are pounced upon by stark, dry samples of voices, breaks, birds and even barks.
This is progressive sound collage for the new beat generation.
Though unlike many others of the instrumental tip, Hanz (mercifully) lets the tracks on A BRIEF GUIDE extend out into FIVE, SEVEN and even SEVENTEEN minute excursions – clocking out at nearly an hour in length and challenging our impression of what an EP/beat-tape/album exactly is.

If something of an enlightened, sonic lorem ipsum is what you need – here is Hanz. Hear, hear. - Waxing Satellite

Hanz, aka producer Brandon Juhans, makes music that is almost unclassifiable. It's jungle-y, hip-hop-ish, cinematic, and it necessitates many hyphens in its descriptors. A Made Bear At Peace is Hanz's latest project following April's FireThief, and like your relationship with your sort-of ex-girlfriend, it's complicated. Tempos shift without warning, onerous beats are backed by the sound of crickets, drums bang deep enough to rattle your tailbone. This is not music that is content to sit in the background of anything.

First track "Throwing" is an idiosyncratic mix of dub, gigantic drums, atmospheric vibes and random samples. "Briefly, FireThief Returns" incorporates dubstep, "The Griot" is straight percussion, and "TrunkBiscuit" is a rattling, humming bit of multiple personality disorder: part murky bass, part punk confusion.

It's a fascinating EP from Hanz. Listen to our Prefix premiere of A Made Bear At Peace below, and visit Hanz's Bandcamp here. - Prefix Magazine

Electronic producer Hanz is dishing out beats that incorporate samples in a startlingly seamless way adding to his already monstrous and unique sound.

Hanz has definitely made a name for himself in my eyes with these productions. They are so unlike anything I have ever heard in this genre and the vast array of sounds he is able to cover is nearly incomprehensible for me and my ears. These are some truly creative and appealing productions that I hope an equally talented MC gets behind and does something special with. There is a great amount of variety from song to song yet it doesn’t fall into the territory of some tracks being far to dense for their own good, each has a cohesive theme that rides throughout all of the layering and progressive switches. This is truly an innovative beat maker at his best and the scary thing is he could still improve from here. - The Needle Drop

Though it experienced a few delays, rap producer HANZ has freed his Reducer record on Bandcamp. Divided into 10 experimental compositions, which are just as prone to containing vignettes within the stated format, Reducer exists on a continuum of avant garde machinations. For example, overture "The History Of" stammers through a hacked drum & bass patterns and rhythmic white noise—seeming devoid of blending—and yet, it closes with a glitchy dub outro to introduce the lighters-up bravado of "Dues". Simply put, HANZ hears contextual overlaps like no other producer before him.

In earlier singles like "War Fiction" and "Count", HANZ seemed to be directing Reducer towards musique concrète and dystopian house, but those signifiers prove to only be the cusp in hearing the duration of the record. The unifying measure is an insatiable interest for the darkside of each genre he assimilates into his sound. Blips of familar 90s rap staples like a sample from Junior Mafia's "Get Money" are manipulated by the presence of a sinster bassline on "Capsule". "Rust (Homage)" arcs dangerously close to the industrial metal of Rammstein, narrowly dodging the slur for territory that feels like a lost recording of the Beatminerz in the studio with Anthrax.

Reducer pushes the definition of rap production like many greats before him. He takes the principles of progressive producers like the Bomb Squad or El-P's dystopian obsessions and pushes them further into a wasteland fit for Snake Plissken. - IMPOSE Magazine