Welcome to the sonic surgery
Who He?
Hanz is Brandon Juhans, a citizen of North Carolina whose singular approach to making music is more in line with musique concrète than any particular contemporary scene. The skill required to get experimental music like this to hang together and not sound like a bunch of crap is more elusive than it appears, and he does it spectacularly well. Just don’t put this on at a dinner party. Actually, scrub that, do put it on at a dinner party.
Why Hanz?
His first offering, ‘Plasty 1’, is 20 minutes of what happens when an artist (as in pens and paper, Juhans was originally was pursuing illustration) turns their beady eye for detail to music. So you get ‘Root Words’, which jangles and stops and starts, never resting for a second, while ‘Your Local Shapeshifter’ utilises an absolute killer of a beat for several exciting bars before it’s nudged out of the limelight by machines clanking and disembodied voices moaning. It’s almost like music made by artificial Iintelligence, which has spent a few gigaflops of processing power listening to the noises humans make and then deciding to start talking back in the same fractured language.
Tell Us More…
There’s precedent for this cut-up approach, of course, and Juhans talks about William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and the whole ‘Plasty’ concept derives from the idea of surgically adjusting flesh, constantly manipulating something with a sharp knife for aesthetic and functional ends. The results are beautiful/ugly.
‘Plasty 1’ is out on Tri Angle
