In 2009, Guy Brewer—then one half of drum’n’bass duo Commix—was manning the decks at a party when he looked up, scanned the crowd, and thought: This is fucking shit. It wasn’t a tantrum so much as an existential diagnosis. Brewer had helped define a corner of late-2000s drum’n’bass, earning the rare distinction of a sanctioned Burial remix, yet he felt like a stranger in his own scene. Within months, he had shed that identity for another: Shifted, a producer of stern, grayscale techno whose cavernous, tightly wound productions made him an unlikely star in Berlin’s industrial underground. It was success by reinvention, the kind that turned self-disgust into propulsion.
But as the techno world inflated into the spectacle Brewer would later dub “business techno,” that same familiar nausea returned. So he did what he always does: he escaped. He left Berlin for Antwerp, packed up his studio, and buried himself in dub techno and drum’n’bass records, tracing his own lineage backward until it began to dissolve. From that long isolation came Carrier—the sound of someone reassembling their musical DNA from the particles up.
Like all great mutations, Carrier begins in synthesis. Brewer folds Basic Channel’s haunted dub minimalism into the aerodynamic violence of ’90s drum’n’bass—particularly the glacial precision of Photek and Source Direct, whose breakbeats felt less programmed than gravitational. Rhythm Immortal, his debut under the alias, sounds like it’s been carved from the air itself. The drums are startlingly tactile, as if they’ve been forged from metal and struck in real time. Every impact feels like a small detonation in a sealed room.
The seeds for this alchemy were planted across a series of EPs—most notably Pre-Millennium Witchcraft, a love letter to the breakbeat sorcery of late-’90s jungle that doubled as a kind of Rosetta Stone for Brewer’s new language. Where Shifted once sculpted vast monoliths of sound, Carrier works in negative space. The EP In Spectra hinted at this shift, but Rhythm Immortal perfects it: the rhythms crawl rather than gallop, drips of percussion suspended in air like mercury. Brewer approaches the mix like a craftsman with tweezers, building tension through micro-movements rather than momentum.
You can trace a faint throughline from the final Shifted LP, Constant Blue Light, to Rhythm Immortal. Both records replace forward thrust with vibration, creating an illusion of stillness that is anything but static. The opener, “A Point Most Crucial,” lands with a whipcrack before its drums splinter into arrhythmic shards, as if gravity itself were being rewritten. Delays reverse, decay envelopes collapse midair, and for brief moments, time seems to hiccup. It’s a higher-resolution evolution of Photek’s martial minimalism—a producer not merely manipulating rhythm but meddling with the physical laws that govern it.
The album’s centerpiece, “Outer Shell,” feels like the culmination of that experiment. Brewer makes the drum kit sound like it’s trudging through mud, then suddenly hydroplanes across the surface. The silence between snare hits is almost frightening in its precision, evoking the reverent hush of a Rudy Van Gelder jazz session. Elsewhere, “Wave After Wave” and “Lowland Tropic” stretch the tensile anxiety of drum’n’bass into new geometries, their icy synths refracting around intricate percussive lattices. These are not tracks designed for the club so much as haunted by it—echoes from a world where the rave has already turned to dust.
The spell peaks with “That Veil of Yours,” a collaboration with the anonymous duo Voice Actor. Noa Kurzweil’s whispery delivery hovers over an uncanny landscape of wind, metallic clangs, and martial drums that seem to breathe in unnatural arcs. Every sound is hyperreal, occupying a physical space within the mix. When it bleeds into the subterranean rumble of “Carbon Works,” the transformation is complete. Brewer has built an ecosystem out of percussion and air pressure—a living, breathing machine that sweats, decays, and hums.
Rhythm Immortal feels like a reclamation of touch in a genre that too often fetishizes frictionless digitalism. Brewer makes electronic music that’s heavy with the residue of labor—music that creaks, sweats, and smolders. It asks what techno might sound like if it were carved from stone instead of sequenced on a grid. By the end, that question starts to feel less rhetorical and more like a revelation. Carrier doesn’t just move through sound; it reanimates it.
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