Breakmaster Cylinder

Breakmaster Cylinder grew up playing music, including compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach.[1] They first began working with music sampling using a ping-pong recording technique with two cassette tape decks. Cylinder later acquired a keyboard with loop-recording capabilities and eventually began making DIY albums of trance music for friends.[2] Cylinder spent more than a decade composing and producing music before finding a wider audience.[3]

Cylinder produced many of their early works using a Novation Launchpad mini drum machine and Fruityloops software before switching to the Cubase digital audio workstation.[4]

Breakmaster Cylinder self-released their first album, Spasmodic Symmetry, in 2006 and then the 2009 Logic Pro-driven Method Man-Monty Python mashup Dolomite! before being picked up by the label Breakbit Music. Breakbit helped issue several of Cylinder's early albums, including Say Hello to Klaus (2010) and See You Around (2011).[5] In 2013 Cylinder started to get some press with the release of Big Schnitzel, an audio mash-up sampling food references made by the Notorious B.I.G.[6]

Cylinder's career took off after scoring the theme for TLDR, an internet-themed segment of the WNYC Studios public radio program On the Media hosted by Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt. Goldman enlisted Cylinder as the show's composer after seeing a music video remixing The Chordettes' song "Mr. Sandman" mashed up with clips from horror cinema.[7] Goldman and Vogt then brought Cylinder along to Gimlet Media when they started the podcast Reply All, for which Cylinder also composed a theme, with a chord structure derived from Bach's "Prelude in C Major" mixed with acoustically recorded drums, a MIDI-derived bass line, and the sounds of rolling jars, spinning coins, and a small glass being shattered by a hammer.[8] Cylinder also contributes recurring musical segments to the show and, for one season, a serialized audio story that appeared at the end of each episode.[2] The space opera-esque serial featured Cylinder and a canine companion, known as "Dog", visiting alien planets while lost in outer space without any guidance from the internet.[7]

Reply All's success led to Cylinder taking other jobs creating themes for more than 60 other podcasts, as well as music for film, advertisements, and video games.[2] In 2015, Cylinder collaborated—via Twitter and Dropbox—with the Switched on Pop podcast to reconstruct then-current compositions by Justin Bieber.[9] In 2018 Cylinder collaborated with media artist Zardulu to produce the track "Ablanathanalba" following Reply All's exposé on Zardulu's viral Pizza Rat phenomenon.[10]

Many of Cylinder's albums are thematic, and include mixtapes, collections of ringtones, and music made for podcasts. The 2014 album Pineapple Princess was partially derived from hearing Alanis Morissette’s music being played in the produce section in supermarkets. The 2017 album Pickled Beets Part III features a year's worth of weekly submissions to the Stones Throw Records beat-writing competition, Stones Throw Beat Battle.[1] Cylinder has also been known to use to their mixes to mess with public radio culture, heard in their parodic remixes of radio themes such as that of Morning Edition.[11]

In 2019 Cylinder collaborated with comedian Bec Hill on her live show I'll Be Bec.[12]

Since Cylinder's earliest contributions to TLDR, radio hosts have credited the composer as "The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder" and claimed to never have met nor spoken with them, and to have no knowledge of who Cylinder actually is.[8] Cylinder has perpetuated this mystique of anonymity in interviews stating, "I guess the anonymity is interesting", and, "My face (if I have a face) doesn't matter".[2] Reply All's Alex Goldman maintains Cylinder's anonymity. "I found him, or they—we don't really know—on the internet," he told the Sydney Morning Herald. "I contacted him and he agreed to work with us, so long as he could remain anonymous."[13] In an audio story about Breakmaster Cylinder's compositional and recording techniques, Song Exploder producer Hrishikesh Hirway states, "I interviewed Breakmaster Cylinder, but out of respect for his or her privacy and mystery, I had an actor replace Breakmaster Cylinder's voice...or did I?"[8]

The name "Breakmaster Cylinder" is a portmanteau of "breakmaster"—a musician who works with breakbeats—and "master cylinder"—an automotive component that regulates the brakes of a car, truck, or motorcycle.[7] When asked about their gender, Cylinder has referred to themself using the singular they pronoun.[3] In photographs, Cylinder appears as a head shrouded in a black motorcycle helmet painted with white bug-eyes.[1] Their head is shown on a variety of different bodies and gender expressions, and occasionally on a manipulated portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach.[1][3] Despite their anonymity, Cylinder has gained repute for responding to fan letters and being easily accessible via the internet.[1]

• Breakmaster Cylinder on Bandcamp
• Breakmaster Cylinder on Discogs
• Breakmaster Cylinder on Free Music Archive
• Breakmaster Cylinder on The Vision
• Breakmaster Cylinder on Podchaser