A modest music esoteric such as myself may never fully understand the instrumental technicalities that went into making an album like Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers. I don’t think that its creator is setting any expectations that you need to overthink it to that degree. That creator — composer and producer Nick Sylvester — has always approached making music more with a question mark rather than a finite answer in everything he’s done, be it his college studies of computer music, an infamously run in absurdist music journalism, his grungy post-hardcore commentary on rock machismo with his band Mr. Dream, becoming James Murphy’s studio protégé, attempts at cracking the code of the independent music scene’s mainstream discourse as an early producer for artists like Channel Tres, Yaeju, and more recently, Sarah Register, or the noisy sonic oddities like YVETTE and Kill Alters he equally made feel like the biggest deals criminally underheard on his previous Brooklyn-based boutique label, Godmode Music.

I’m not sure what exactly took him so long to get to putting his own debut album, but like Sylvester’s own footprint in the music world, Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers, succeeds at being unlike the rest of the landscape at this very moment. The approach here is a simple one: to takes the breakbeat to its breaking point. The result here is anything but: it goes well beyond just drumming. He weaponizes super-sliced samples and reconstructed modular synths to pattern 15 instrumental tracks into what you might imagine would result if you took rhythm-focused beats from the corners of rap, drill, house, garage, and drum & bass, and deconstructed them down to the atomic level –only to rearrange them in flashes of hyper-speed or in resistance to timelapse altogether. A nerdier version of Oneohtrix Point Never’s earliest material which approaches sound as a science would be the album’s most proximate descriptor in sound, and yet, Sylvester’s musique concrète desires no need for any punctuation beyond the question or exclamation mark. Anything else would waste too much time in thinking rather than allowing an otherwise singular listening experience to alter the way you consider the art of the beat.

Highlights: “Tinari”, “Jaki”, “Ray”

Nick Sylvester’s Stereo Music for Breakbeats and Samplers is available now on Smartdumb.

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