Rhythm Immortal – Carrier
2025
In 2009, Guy Brewer was riding a wave of success as one half of the drum’n’bass duo Commix when a creeping realization set in. Standing behind the decks at a party, he looked out at the crowd and thought, bluntly, that none of it felt right anymore. Despite being part of one of the most respected drum’n’bass projects of the late 2000s—an era-defining run that even earned an official remix from Burial—Brewer no longer recognized himself in the scene. Rather than force it, he walked away.
His next incarnation was a hard pivot. Under the name Shifted, Brewer plunged into stark, industrial four-on-the-floor techno, earning a reputation for grim, hyper-focused sound design and a presence that straddled experimental music and the more indulgent corners of European club culture. Yet even that world began to feel restrictive as techno ballooned into a more commercial, brand-driven enterprise—an evolution Brewer famously skewered by coining the phrase “business techno.” Eventually, the cycle repeated. He left Berlin for Antwerp, withdrew from the spotlight, and immersed himself in dub techno and classic drum’n’bass until another transformation took shape: Carrier.
Carrier is built from synthesis, the same process that underpins much of electronic music’s most enduring innovations. Where Detroit pioneers fused Kraftwerk with funk, and dub techno producers collapsed reggae into minimalist club structures, Brewer draws from two seemingly distant lineages. One is the submerged, echo-heavy world of Rhythm & Sound, the Basic Channel offshoot that lends Carrier its name. The other is the cerebral ’90s drum’n’bass of figures like Source Direct and Photek, whose radical time-stretching techniques made rhythm feel elastic, as if beats could pause, rewind, or fracture mid-air. These elements don’t coexist peacefully so much as grind against each other, producing music that gestures toward the dancefloor without ever fully committing to it—simultaneously futuristic and primordial.
Rhythm Immortal, Brewer’s first full-length album as Carrier, is the most distilled expression of this approach. The percussion feels startlingly physical, as though crafted by hand rather than programmed: impacts land like metal striking stone, pushing air with each hit. The sensation isn’t just rhythmic—it’s tactile. You don’t simply hear the drums; you feel them occupy space.
The EPs that preceded the album hinted at this language, but Rhythm Immortal sharpens it into something singular. A key reference point was Brewer’s mixtape Pre-Millennium Witchcraft, a deep excavation of late-’90s drum’n’bass that still sounds uncannily advanced. That mix acted as a kind of cipher, revealing how three-dimensional rhythm could feel when freed from rigid grids. Earlier Carrier releases showcased intricate percussive work, but the album takes a more restrained path, slowing everything down to a near-drip of beats and textures, each sound placed with surgical care.
There’s a clear throughline to Brewer’s final Shifted album, Constant Blue Light, which replaced techno’s usual propulsion with a massive, slowly shifting wall of microscopic motion. Rhythm Immortal operates in a similar way. The opening track, “A Point Most Crucial,” begins with a sharp crack that feels like it disturbs the ground beneath it, then unspools into a staggered pattern that resists easy categorization. Sounds reverse direction, vanish abruptly, or hang suspended, as if the music itself is testing the limits of time. Rather than manipulating rhythm alone, Brewer seems to toy with causality—freezing moments, flipping them, then letting them run forward again.
This sense of warped physics reaches its peak on “Outer Shell.” Here, drums behave like unfamiliar elements, slogging through imagined terrain before suddenly skimming across the surface. The tension is heightened by strategic silences and snare hits that feel almost acoustic in their sharpness. Elsewhere, tracks like “Wave After Wave” and “Lowland Tropic” translate the propulsion of drum’n’bass into nervous, flickering undercurrents beneath cool, precisely shaped synth lines. The result is music that bypasses intellect and goes straight to the body, summoning echoes of Brewer’s past without lapsing into nostalgia.
The album’s most uncanny moment arrives with “That Veil of Yours,” a collaboration with Voice Actor. Noa Kurzweil’s breathy, serpentine delivery drifts through a landscape of wind, percussion, and abrasive texture, producing an ASMR-like intensity. Everything feels slightly off—angles are wrong, surfaces too smooth or too sharp—but every element is vividly present, occupying real space. This isn’t digital abstraction so much as imagined physical reality.
As “That Veil of Yours” dissolves into the subterranean force of “Carbon Works,” Rhythm Immortal reveals its core question: What would techno sound like if it were forged from muscle, stone, and motion rather than software? The answer is unsettling, exhilarating, and—most surprisingly—new. In an era where reinvention often means rearranging familiar pieces, Carrier achieves something rarer: a sound that feels genuinely rediscovered, as if dug out of the ground rather than assembled on a screen.
