What Is Carrier All About?
An interview with the veteran British producer, who explains why he left behind his acclaimed Shifted project (and the techno genre) and what inspires his sonically hard-to-pin-down new endeavor.
What does Carrier sound like? The answer to that question has so far proven to be rather elusive. Although music journalists and headsy listeners have enthusiastically embraced the project over the past two years, they routinely struggle to succinctly describe the music, probably because there’s little else in the contemporary electronic sphere that sounds quite like it. References to dub techno, ambient and drum & bass are frequent, but when talking about Carrier, the word techno also tends to come up quite often. That’s not because the records sound like stereotypical Berghain fodder—they most certainly do not—but because the man behind those records, Guy Brewer, previously spent a decade operating under the name Shifted, garnering repeated accolades as one of the techno genre’s most talented figures. (Those talents also extended to his curatorial skills, as Brewer headed up the much-loved Avian label.)
Considering how difficult it is for an artist to establish themselves and build even a modicum of name recognition, it’s not often that someone will abandon a moniker that they’ve spent years developing, particularly when that moniker has been greeted with a not insignificant amount of critical acclaim. But Brewer did exactly that, setting aside both Shifted and Avian while diving headlong into not just a new artist name, Carrier, but an amorphous new sound as well. Moreover, he did so while also leaving behind his adopted home of Berlin and setting up a much more tranquil life in the Belgian city of Antwerp.
What prompted such a dramatic turn? Up until now, Brewer has been largely quiet on the matter, allowing his music to speak for itself. (And to his credit, that music—which includes the Lazy Mechanics tape on The Trilogy Tapes, the FATHOM EP for FELT and a trio of self-released EPs, including the recently released Tender Spirits—has been consistently impressive.) But for those familiar with the broader arc of his musical career, Brewer’s latest about-face is perhaps less surprising. Back before he established himself as Shifted, the UK-born artist spent more than a decade in the world of drum & bass—a genre he first fell in love with as a teenager—and found major success as a member of the group Commix. Leaving that behind couldn’t have been easy either, but perhaps periodic reinvention is simply something he feels compelled to do every 10 years or so.
Curious to find out, I asked Brewer if he would be up for an interview. While he’s largely steered clear of the discourse in recent years, I figured he’d have plenty to say. During the Shifted years, he was anything but shy about sharing his thoughts and opinions, and he was famously—or perhaps infamously—credited with coining the term “business techno” in a 2018 tweet. When we hopped on a call last weekend, he still had a few choice observations about the techno landscape and the current state of the scene, but the bulk of our conversation had a distinctly optimistic bent, probably because the Carrier project has him feeling newly energized. He talked about its genesis and the influences he’s drawing from, and what it’s like to forge ahead with a new, sonically nebulous endeavor in a time when fitting neatly into a box is often considered a key to success in the electronic music realm.