Bursting through the fog of the San Francisco Bay Area, Electronic Producer BZ is pegging the meters hard. Fans describe him as Skrillex meets Nine Inch Nails and has Steve Vai as their bastard child.

BZ stands out not only as a wicked Dubstep Producer, but also his mastery of Metal guitar which he adds to his music. BZ has a degree in classical guitar from the University of Texas at Austin, but despite a classical background, his music rocks!

BZ's new Dolby Atmos™ album "Infinite Point" has just been released- stream it on iTunes, Amazon HD, and Tidal. His previous albums (Unobtainium [2014], Dark Days [2011], BZ 2.0 [2009], Reserved [2003]) have been successes, getting placed in untold film and TV shows and achieving kickstarter and Indiegogo funding goals to complete the projects.

The last few years have been very good for BZ. Many songs from the albums are on all the major TV networks, and tons of songs are on several MTV and other cable shows. These placements have not only generated enough funds to "stay in the game", but also to be able to create new albums.

Interview:

What is your musical background? How did you first get involved with music?

I grew up in my father's home studio in a small town in west Texas. I remember being 7 years old and duplicating tapes for my father's daily radio program 'The Sound of Texas', spooling 1/4 inch tapes on an Ampex reel to reel machine. It wasn't long before the studio/music bug crept into my life. About the same time, I started playing piano and at age 14 developed a love for guitar. I attended an audio engineering school in Texas and later received my B.A. in music with an emphasis on classical guitar from the University of Texas at Austin where I was honored as one of the best guitarists in the state of Texas by "Texas Beat Magazine" in 1992 while playing with my metal band "Culture Shock."

My father played trumpet, and my mom played Piano. My father had an ARP 2600 synthesizer to make sounds for his radio show. It was just incredible, and I still think about that synth's architecture when I think about signal flow and sound creation. When I was 14, my brother, who also plays guitar, showed me a chord or two on the guitar. I think within that day I was playing along with Van Halen albums, and then soon I could play along with the all the early Rush albums. I think the piano background helped me tremendously in my guitar playing. Playing guitar kinda became an obsession, and that's all I wanted to do, which sustained me through college.

What are some of your accomplishments?

I've played hundreds of shows, I've won an award for being one of the top ten best guitar players in Texas, I graduated with a B.A. in Music, my day job is composing music for film and TV and being a producer for artists and bands, I've won 6 Emmy's for some of the TV work I've done, I won a few Telly Awards and many other nominations and honors, I've released 6 albums and I'm working on a 7th, my work has been on Platinum selling video games, national ad campaigns, all the major networks, and scores of independent films. A big chunk of my income is from royalty payments from TV shows and films that are using my music. And I'm a husband who somehow manages to spend quality time with my kids.

What project are you currently working on, and what is the background story? How did the band/project get started?

I'm currently working on a new CD, my 7th CD to be released. All of my albums have stayed in the electronic realm. the new one is a similar exploration of Dubstep as my last CD, "Infinite Point", but the difference is that I'll be incorporating more guitar work that I felt was missing from my last two CDs. Infinite Point and Unobtainium, my most recent CDs, were unapologetically dubstep in terms of it's broad use of synths, with only sprinkles of guitar. Now that I've made these two works, I feel like my new project can stretch out a bit and expand the boundaries of what I consider to be Dubstep with more inclusion of guitars.

Just as a word of warning, there's no band here, It's just me. I got inspired to start making CD's when I was producing a band at my studio, and one of the band members had owned a recording studio for decades and never made his own album. I thought that was terrible, and here I was, a decade into owning my own studio, and I had never put out an album either. Sure, I've made a ton of albums for other bands, composed a lot of music for TV and film, but I hadn't yet made my own thing. It was time.


 What is your Artist name? Where are you from?

My band's name is simply my name, BZ. I grew up in a small town in Texas called Big Spring. Often people in the south are referred to by their first and middle name. "Brian Zack" was too much to say for such a small 3 year old kid, so my parents started calling me "BZ" for short. It just stuck. All these years later, that's still what I go by.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future in music?

I love the idea of getting more people involved with playing guitar and recording. I think the common meme for guitar players is that it has no place in electronic music. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, they go together quite well. I want people to know that it's all just music, it's nothing to be afraid of. That being said, I also want to push the boundaries of what guitar playing can be. How far can it go in terms of new sounds and playing styles? It feels limitless! And that's because it is.