HANZ

Berlin · b. 1990 · FARA Records

HANZ (b. 23 September 1990, Berlin) is the right age to have caught the real thing — born months after the Wall came down, he grew up in the city precisely as its techno scene was building itself out of the vacuum: the abandoned power stations and factories in the former East that became the clubs, the years when a warehouse party was a genuinely temporary thing in a genuinely empty building. He's old enough to remember when the spaces were still half-derelict and not yet monuments, which is the difference between somebody who lives in this music and somebody who visits it. He found his way in standing in front of a stack in a concrete room at seventeen and feeling a distorted kick in his sternum — the origin story of everybody in this genre and nonetheless his. He learned production the long unglamorous way and has been making hard techno for close to two decades, through the years it was unfashionable and into the years it became the biggest dance music on the planet again. He's entirely unmoved by either phase.

Barely any voice, and what there is has been pitched down, filtered and pushed through distortion until it belongs to the machine rather than to a person — vocal stabs used as percussion, not as topline. The identity is entirely in the sound design: a distorted kick that's the whole low end, an acid 303 line that mutates and screams, relentless industrial percussion, and space used as a weapon. He builds sounds to be physical rather than pretty and can talk at length about the specific distortion chain on a kick. His influences run the Berlin hard-techno and industrial lineage and its roots in the post-reunification warehouse scene; the Chicago acid tradition for the 303; and the specific discipline of building a whole track from a kick, a squelch and space, with nothing decorative in it.

Minimal and unsmiling, and not as an act — he plays long and hard with the room dark and doesn't perform himself at all. Nearly two decades in a genre that's been fashionable and unfashionable and fashionable again has left him with no interest in the discourse around it; he lets the kick do the talking. He built Papi's Warehouse around one specific unlicensed night: no flyers, no branding, a promoter everybody just called Papi, and a floor that emptied out somewhere around dawn. The whole of his sound is a kick, a 303 and space — he considers anything else on a hard-techno record to be a confession of weakness. There's exactly one photograph of him in the entire release, and he's not doing anything in it. Severe, precise, unbothered.