Track By Track: Carrier – Rhythm Immortal

Carrier has previously released material via the likes of The Trilogy Tapes and Felt but this is the first album, the first statement of intent if you will. He describes the influence as follows:

“I’m interested in what happens when different materials strike each other. The way an object sounds depends a lot on how you excite it,” says Carrier. “When I use samples, it’s about making them react with another sound. You might have a simple source, but it’s used to strike something more abstract. It becomes more about reverberation or resonance, the shadow cast by a sound.

I wanted it to feel like a dream you have where you’re somewhere familiar, which feels nevertheless otherworldly.”

We invited him to go further, taking us through track by track:

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A Point Most Crucial  

I think this was actually the first thing I wrote after deciding to start working towards an LP. I’ve found myself reducing the  number of elements at play more and more throughout the course of the first few records I’d done as Carrier, but this felt  particularly reduced and skeletal even by my standards.  

Like almost everything I write, it started with drum programming. In this case that was using a modular sequencer  triggering a sampler made by Rossum Electro-Music. Once I had a basic rhythmic framework, there was a lot of computer  processing involved. Not just in terms of tone, but using sidechaining with gates to make some sounds cut when others hit.  It’s a technique I use often to help create a sense of reactivity between sounds.  

Aside from the drums, what’s there is very simple. The “pads” are actually heavily pitched flute samples. Woodwind, or  sounds that at least try to mimic it, feature quite heavily across the record as a whole, albeit subtly.  

Outer Shell  

With this record I was very interested in the idea of the synthetic sounding almost organic. There’s a very interesting wave  of experimental percussionists and drummers operating right now. From my point of view a lot of what they’re doing draws  strong parallels with certain drum and bass producers from the late ’90s, particularly people like Paradox, Equinox, or even  some Photek records.  

I guess this track was my take on that. It’s certainly not a drum and bass track, but I wanted it to have that push and pull  feeling you get from programming breakbeats, while also feeling like it was actually being played rather than programmed.  Again, the percussive elements make up most of what’s happening.  

The intro and breakdown feature some pitched, feedback-like sounds. If I recall correctly, this is a Max for Live instrument  from Fors called Pluck, which is being pitched right down by an Eventide harmoniser, then run into an instance of Valhalla  Delay. The use of short delay times, either for feedback-type sounds or Karplus-Strong synthesis, is something I use a lot. It  has this organic yet otherworldly quality to it.  

That Veil of Yours (feat. Voice Actor)  

This was actually the last track completed for the record. Often when recording an LP you reach a point where you’re still  missing that intangible something. It can prove quite elusive figuring out exactly what that is.  

We were about a week out from mastering when the idea of approaching Noa came up. There was an instrumental version  of this that was very different. I basically stripped it down and started again with the kick and a couple of percussive  elements.  

The main pad sound is just a basic detuned oscillator played by hand with no sequencing involved. It’s so heavily  processed that not much of the initial sound remains. Much of what you hear is actually a reverb reacting to its input. I  played it loosely over the beat, didn’t quantise the recording, and just left it feeling loose and human. After that I recorded  some other notes and reversed them for these sucking sounds that play around the main melody.  

I received the vocals from Voice Actor maybe 48 hours before we mastered. I ran them through an Overstayer Modular  Channel to clamp down on dynamics and add some grit, then into the computer where I applied some subtle ring  modulation and reverb. As soon as it came together it felt like something had clicked into place for the record as a whole.  

Carbon Works  

Across much of this record there’s a strong focus on the genesis of a sound not being as important as the output. You can  feed, for instance, the transient of a snare into a chain of processing, and what comes out the other end can be some kind  of reflection of the sound you started with, but viewed through an old mirror with cracks and blemishes.  

I find this idea really interesting. It’s like the seed of a sound falling and growing into something that shares its DNA but is a  mutation of it. Carbon Works is a good example of this. Much of the work on this track came from experimenting with a set  of sounds, throwing them into various devices and seeing what came out the other side.  

In places it almost feels dubstep-like in its sense of groove, but definitely quite alien. Aside from the kick drum, I made sure  to place all the percussion sounds off-grid, just nudging things around until it felt right. 

Wave After Wave  

The drums for this took a long time to get right. Some tracks for me can feel so natural and instinctive that they almost  write themselves, and other times you just have to stay true to a vision or an ideal, and not get thrown off course even  when something is a struggle to complete.  

First off, it’s in 5/4, and I’m not used to working in alternative time signatures. Secondly, what makes it work is far more  about what isn’t there than what is. A lot of things are suggested or implied, and this kind of programming can be quite  time-consuming to pull off correctly.  

I like grooves that are open to interpretation, that can make a listener lose track of where they are before pulling it back  with a sound that anchors everything again. The result is something that feels quite ambiguous in terms of tempo. It feels a  lot faster than it is, but it’s also got that half-time and double-time push to it.  

The main synth sound, once again, isn’t actually a synth. It’s processed woodwind samples fed into dense granular  processing and heavy reverb. I love these kinds of haunting textures that wash over you and make you lose your sense of  time.  

Amber Circle  

I wanted to try and achieve something here that had a sense of propulsion, even though the groove itself is very slow. I  think the kicks and subs work over 16 bars even. When you have that much space around things without an anchor point  it’s quite hard to keep a sense of pace and urgency, so that was the challenge here, having sounds around it that push the  groove through and stop it feeling laborious.  

I often feel when I’m writing music that I’m basically trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It’s about taking something  that inherently shouldn’t work and pursuing it anyway.  

I did a long session just messing around with the FM algorithm on a Synthesis Technologies E370 here too. The sounds  that are almost vocal-like are actually synthetic. I recorded them purposefully out of key, then used heavy pitch correction  quite sloppily, so you can hear the note being dragged back into scale. They’re also quite heavily distorted and resampled  after that, and fed through Ableton’s Echo effect, which has actually become my go-to delay recently.  

Lowland Tropic  

Again, this is me chasing something that feels organic yet not. I wanted the rhythmic elements to feel almost as though  they’re on the edge of collapsing. I programmed it all straight, then each sound was fed into its own signal chain and  processed to such an extent that the timing became very loose.  

The chords are very simple sine waves from an Elektron Digitone, fed into a pitch shifter and some distortion with ramped  modulation pushing and pulling the drive amount around. Then I added these subtle feedback-type sounds from a physical  modelling plug-in made by Madrona Labs, again heavily processed and resampled before being played back in with no  quantisation.  

This was written early in the process of doing the LP. At one point I had imagined a vocal around it, but in the end it was  used as is, and feels almost like a pause in proceedings before the final section of the record.  

Offshore (feat. Memotone)  

I originally asked Will to write some parts around another track I had written for the record. But when I got it back from him  I felt like, although I loved what he’d done, it felt like too much of a shift in aesthetic quality. I scrapped the original idea,  took his parts, and worked with them much as I’d work with a sound source I’d recorded myself, trying to pull his  recordings into my own zone.  

For the drums I wanted them to have a kind of jazz-like swing to them, but skewed and glitched out, slightly out of focus.  I’m not musically or rhythmically trained in any way, but I do read about rhythmic theory and try to interpret it in my own  naive way. For this I’d been looking at the idea of nested tuplets, little sections within sections of a measure. Once I had  that down and had managed to get a cohesive groove going, I started placing Will’s heavily processed parts around this  rhythmic skeleton, and it came together very fast.