Researchers and medical professionals agree: boredom is no longer a pathological condition in our time, but a luxury commodity. It »not only fosters creative ideas, but also emotional competence and maturity«, as the German science portal gehirn.info puts it. And where else, really, would one expect nothing but the truth? Guy Brewer gets bored easily. But he does not enjoy boredom: for him, it means stagnation. What drives him is the urge to develop, to do things differently from everyone else.
From the early 2010s to the early 2020s, under the name Shifted and via his label Avian, he forged a distinct techno aesthetic – usually four-to-the-floor, yet unmistakable in its sparse, though richly produced sense of desolation. He pursued this path until he felt that he »had nothing more to say in that context. After twelve years, I could no longer find a way to be original«, as he told GROOVE in 2025.
Rhythm Immortal
So what next? Off to pastures new? Only partly. To find new inspiration, Brewer returned to his musical roots – to those influences that had drawn him to electronic music in the mid-1990s: first- and second-wave dub techno, acts like Monolake or Basic Channel, and above all drum’n’bass. At 15 or 16, the young Guy was captivated by what emerged from the soundsystem primordial soup and its offshoot, jungle: rattling breaks, idling bass pressure, and exactly the right dose of jazz and soul. To honour these roots and reconnect with them, he released the mixtape Pre-Millennium Witchcraft (1995–1998) on Berceuse Heroique in 2024. It does, indeed, sound fresh. Naivety, experimental zeal and the spirit of departure of the 1990s ooze from every track.
Away from the edge of the abyss, straight into it
By this point, Brewer no longer called himself Shifted. He had long since adopted a new alias: Carrier – a term from FM synthesis in electronic music production, and at the same time a statement. For Brewer, music comes first. He is one of those artists whose work leaves no room for humour, no safety net. The first release under this new guise was the tape Lazy Mechanics, issued on The Trilogy Tapes in 2023. It leaves a lasting impression of how Carrier is meant to sound: still mechanical and dark, but constantly searching, less functional. Where Shifted danced at the edge of the abyss, Carrier steps straight into it and ploughs through it with care.
»I’m not nostalgic. I want things to feel like the future, not retrofuturism.«
Guy Brewer aka Carrier
It was the EP Fathom, released at the end of 2023, that truly nailed down Brewer’s new sound. Dry and metallic, it recalls those Autechre releases from the early 2000s in which the likewise British duo pared back their formerly expansive melodic arcs in favour of wildly twitching beat structures. Carrier’s music is driven by the same impulse that rendered Shifted obsolete for Brewer. It jerks in seemingly unpredictable ways, shambles like a wheezing alien through an abandoned space station – yet follows a pattern obscured by complex polyrhythms.
In the interview quoted above, Brewer explains what motivates him besides stagnation: the avoidance of regression. »I’m not a nostalgic person. I want things to feel like the future, not like retrofuturism. And that’s exactly the feeling I wanted to process in relation to drum’n’bass.« He achieves this feat in 2025 with the album Rhythm Immortal. It is the logical consequence of Pre-Millennium Witchcraft (1995–1998) and Brewer’s demands of himself: a perfectly formed horror vision of his favourite genre. On this LP, drum’n’bass is stripped of its swagger, reduced to its bare skeleton, meticulously dissected. And where the bone becomes tangible, boredom has no chance..
