"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 showcased that percussive wizardry, Rhythm Immortal slows things down to a faucet drip of drums and arcane noises, a chef plating with tweezers."
"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."
"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."
Carrier evolved a distinctive techno vocabulary that fuses junglist drum'n'bass aesthetics with meticulous, three-dimensional percussion. Pre-Millennium Witchcraft functions as a Rosetta Stone, presenting mid-late-'90s drum'n'bass with uncanny immediacy and spatial realism. Rhythm Immortal abandons forward techno propulsion in favor of slowed, faucet-drip rhythms and arcane noises, emphasizing microscopic percussive movement. The record echoes the final Shifted LP Constant Blue Light in prioritizing texture and subtle motion over conventional beat momentum. Opener drums land with whipcrack force, then jitter in herky-jerky patterns, employing reversed delays and sudden gating to dissolve and reconstitute rhythmic events.
Read at Pitchfork
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]