About

Carrier’s debut album features eight elegantly rude arrangements that dance in negative space between Photek’s frictional syncopations, Rhythm & Sound’s dubwise minimalism and Torsten Pröfrock’s fractured dynamics, bolstered on two tracks by contributions from Voice Actor & Memotone, summoning a noirish, jazzier frisson to his signature metrics and temporalities.

Since hard-snagging our ears and feet in 2023 with 12”s for FELT and his own eponymous label, Guy Brewer’s Carrier has become the go-to project for anyone who had almost given up on chasing these sort of ultra-subtle but vitally distinctive new permutations in dance music. For the past two years, his unpredictable variations within a style have kept us all tip-toed and seat-edged with organisations of a finely chiselled percussive palette and smouldering ambient noise that distills the salient aspects and spirits of D&B, dub techno, electro-acoustic music and trip hop with unique traction. In effect, he’s enacted a clear leap of imagination from previous work issued as part of Commix and solo as Shifted that only continues to reveal hallucinatory psychoacoustics on this first album detail. 

Rhythm Immortal sees Brewer tilt the project into slower, resoundingly more atmospheric realms, better to luxuriate in the instinctive guile and integer-stepping style ’n pattern of his incredible sound. At the album’s poles, a vocal cameo by cult gynoid Voice Actor follows from Gavsborg’s on a preceding 7” single to ideally model his sound’s mutability and compatibility with trip hop forms, and Memotone helps seal the deal with a hovering glow lent to ‘Offshore’, whilst Carrier jostles the reins throughout with masterful control of his thing, crisply purposed to the album canvas. In that context, it’s perfectly adaptable to bodies both supine or in motion, ushering a hypnagogic sway with ‘A Point Most Crucial’, and hingeing around the slightest interplay of 16th note hi-hat ruffles and recoiling reverbs on ‘Outer Shell’, or blissfully stepping on knife-edge 2-step on ‘Wave After Wave’. 

The album conveys a deeply personal pulse and spiritual devotion to that kind of all-tension-no-release mode typical of so much music we love - from Kode9’s earliest re-factoring of Prince to Photek’s ‘Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu’, from T++/Dynamo and Traktor’s asymmetric dynamics to Burial’s shockout debut - refactored with a rare conviction in its unspoken powers to activate the eyes-shut imagination. Unmissable stuff. — (via Boomkat)
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The Brussels-based producer fled the strictures of techno and drum’n’bass in search of a freer sound. On his astonishing debut LP under a new alias, he seems to rewrite the laws of physics.

Carrier, like so much great electronic music, is the direct result of blending what came before it. Think Detroit techno originators mixing Kraftwerk, YMO, and George Clinton, or dub techno mashing up reggae and Jeff Mills records. In this case, the base ingredients are Basic Channel’s Rhythm & Sound project (where the name Carrier comes from) and ’90s drum’n’bass artists like Source Direct and Photek, who took the timestretching style of jungle and made it sound like they could actually stop time, with drums that sliced the air in strange patterns. The result references the dancefloor more than it lives on it, an approach that feels futuristic and stone age at the same time. On Rhythm Immortal, Brewer’s debut album as Carrier, the drum sounds feel unusually physical, like they’re the product of humans striking rods against iron or rock. You can feel the air move with each thwack.

Even for an artist so adept at reinvention, Carrier’s run of EPs leading up to Rhythm Immortal was astounding. He developed an original techno language with an ancient junglist script. A mixtape called Pre-Milennium Witchcraft was the Rosetta Stone, a showcase of mid-late-’90s drum’n’bass that still sounds dumbfounding today. It’s precise and complex, with that in-the-room feeling that Carrier conures up, the sound of objects in three-dimensional space rather than an Ableton grid. Where EPs like In Spectra showcased that percussive wizardry, Rhythm Immortal slows things down to a faucet drip of drums and arcane noises, a chef plating with tweezers.

There is one other precedent for Rhythm Immortal: the final Shifted record, Constant Blue Light, which focused on the microscopic movement of percussion and synths as part of a monolithic wall of sound in place of techno’s usual forward motion. Carrier’s album has the same feel—the first drums on opener “A Point Most Crucial” land with a whipcrack, jostling up soil around them, and then work out a herky-jerky pattern that doesn’t feel rooted in any familiar dance music genre. Percussive sounds move backwards and then forwards, with delay envelopes that are reversed or suddenly gated, dissolving instantly. It sounds like a higher-tech version of Photek’s infamous drum martial arts, playing with the very fabric of the spacetime continuum, not just the rhythms of drum’n’bass—as though Brewer were playing god with the laws of physics, freezing events in real time and reversing them before letting them unspool forward once again.

This effect is strongest on “Outer Shell.” Here, Brewer turns elemental forces unfamiliar, with drums that seem to wade through a mucky pond before suddenly aquaplaning over the top. The effect is startling, especially given the periodic silences between sharp snare drums that could have been ripped from a Rudy Van Gelder session. “Wave After Wave” and “Lowland Tropic” both retool the thrust of drum’n’bass into an anxious pitter-patter undergirded by pretty synth melodies that are formed into icily perfect geometric shapes. This is music that makes you feel it more than hear it, channeling the ghosts of Brewer’s glory days into an eerie dance-music shadow realm.

Rhythm Immortal asks: What if techno were made from blood, sweat, and stone, instead of inside a laptop? As “That Veil of Yours” bleeds into the earth-shaking rumble of “Carbon Works,” that hypothetical starts to feel a little scary, but also exhilarating. And, most shockingly of all, genuinely new. — (via Pitchfork)

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Label: Modern Love
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, 45 RPM
Released: 2025
Genre: Electronic
Style: Experimental

File under: Ambient / Experimental / IDM
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