Rhythm Immortal

In 2009, Guy Brewer, riding high as part of drum’n’bass duo Commix, looked around the room at a party he was DJing and thought, “This is fucking shit.” He was part of one of the genre’s most consequential acts of the late ’00s—one of a rare few acts to get an official Burial remix—but he didn’t feel at home there. So he switched gears to burly, monochrome four-on-the-floor beats and found equal success making po-faced, sound design–obsessed techno under the name Shifted. He had one foot in experimental ambient and noise music, and another in the Berlin-centric techno playboy DJ circuit. But as techno became bigger business (Brewer, in fact, coined the sardonic term “business techno”), he came to find it just as stifling as drum’n’bass. So he packed up, left Berlin for Antwerp with his partner, and holed up with dub techno and drum’n’bass records until he came out the other side with another complete reinvention: Carrier.

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.

This ouija board act peaks with “That Veil of Yours,” an ASMR-tingly collaboration with Voice Actor. Noa Kurzweil’s distinct, sibilant voice exhales over an artificial soundscape of howling wind and martial drums. It all sounds uncanny, moving in unnatural arcs with textures that are sanded down and trebly. But every sound in “That Veil of Yours” is concrete and present, taking up space in a way we don’t usually associate with electronic music. 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.

Carrier: Rhythm Immortal

$55 at Amazon