Carrier – Rhythm Immortal
This album has really been a jolt for me, and has had me rethinking my whole listening situation. God, where to start.
It’s such a soundy record. It reminds me of how little time and space I have carved out in my life right now for focused hi-fi listening. A lot of my listening time is a) while I’m working on stuff at my desk (high fidelity, but half attention), or b) while I’m on my way somewhere (full attention, but earbuds intermittently drowned out by the city unless I’m listening to pop or band music at near max volume). So like, I don’t really have a lot of time or space right now to just luxuriate in music like this. It’s fucked up.
There’s an anxiety and a neurotic urgency in knowing this and stumbling on a record that has all the signifiers of something I know I’d be really into. It’s spare, weird, ambiguous, dark, sensual, both a cold wind and the glow of a night out. I see reviewers mention Photek as a touch point—which, yes, but somehow torn and smeared, made strange.
Part of me keeps reaching for this record over the past weeks just because I haven’t really fallen for a whole album—not really—in a long minute. I’d really like to. My listening habits have been all breadth and no depth these past few years. Part of the deal with grownup life I guess. Fuck that!
There’s a lot of rhythm in this record, but you pretty much can’t nod your head to it. One reviewer says it sounds like he’s rewriting the laws of physics. That’s one way of putting it. To me our waking world of cyclical, pulse-based rhythms feels strongly implied rather than stated outright, and we’re left wandering through this dreamlike collection of, I almost wanna say “propositions,” or I don’t know, echoes of dance music. (The guest vocals from Voice Actor do a great deal to push it further in that direction. If you didn’t catch her four and a half hour release [?!] Sent from My Telephone in 2022 it’s never too late.)
I don’t really hang out in dance music, but I def lurk a bit and love to catch occasional outliers like this. This one’s really hitting for me right now. Out on Modern Love.