Plasty I is the first in a series of two EPs from North Carolina-based producer
Hanz, following Tri Angle's 2016 vinyl issue of his Reducer full-length. The release continues much in the same vein as the album, with tracks consisting of discordant beats and cut-and-paste samples, resembling dream sequences rather than songs. The producer draws from many styles of music, particularly gritty post-punk and abstract hip-hop, but he's more influenced by film than anything else, and the music seems like the aural equivalent of surrealist montages of flickering black-and-white images. The title track features floating voices and scuttling breakbeats ricocheting from one speaker to the other, with a battering rhythm barely holding it all together. Most of the sounds seem to be very brief excerpts of larger ideas or messages, and the voices are cut too close to reveal any words. "King Speed" seems to air things out a bit, providing a bit of space beside the tension, but it still seems far from relaxed. On "Root Words," a fuzzy, compressed beat drops in twice, changing the tempo to a blown-out lurch and knocking the listener off guard. On "A Breathing House," a few stray sax blurts and tumbling jazz drums are dropped into a collage of drifting and scanning sounds. "Page" is the longest and most nervous-sounding track on the EP, with a series of stammering voices and beats, punctuated by a single resonating 8-bit ping.
Hanz seems to leave it up to the listener to extract meaning from his audio scenes. There are no easy answers or explanations, and he's not following an established template. More often than not, it sounds fascinating, and this EP is just as strong as Reducer. ~ Paul Simpson