Breakmaster Cylinder, also known as The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, by the initials BmC, or simply as ”The Master”, is a musical composer and producer who has provided title themes and background music for a number of radio shows and podcasts. Cylinder came to notoriety with the launch of Gimlet Media's Reply All in 2016 and was a fixture on that show until it ended in 2022. Known for their pseudonymity, Breakmaster Cylinder does not make public appearances and has employed stand-ins for interviews, photographs, and other media engagements.
Development and early career
Breakmaster Cylinder grew up playing piano, learning to perform classical compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and others.[3][4] They first began working with music sampling using ping-pong recording techniques between two cassette tape decks, and then later acquired a keyboard with loop-recording capabilities. Cylinder's first releases were DIY albums of trance music made just for friends.[5] Cylinder spent more than a decade composing and producing music before finding a wider audience.[6]
In 2006 Breakmaster Cylinder self-released their first album Spasmodic Symmetry, followed by 2009's Logic Pro-driven Method Man/Monty Python mashup Dolomite! Cylinder's next albums, Say Hello to Klaus (2010) and See You Around (2011) were released under the Breakbit Music label.[7] 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.[8]
In their early days as a composer, Cylinder worked as a food delivery driver and often wrote music while parked on the side of the road.[3] They produced many of their early works using a Novation Launchpad mini drum machine and Fruityloops software before switching to the Cubase digital audio workstation.[9] Aside from Bach as a recurring theme in their music and imagery, Breakmaster Cylinder has also cited Art Tatum, The Beatles, Nine Inch Nails, and Squarepusher as influences on their work.[10]
Cylinder's career took off after scoring the theme for TL;DR, an internet-themed segment hosted by Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt for the WNYC Studios public radio program On the Media. Goldman enlisted Cylinder as the show's composer after seeing a music video that they had made for their remix of The Chordettes' song "Mr. Sandman" set to a montage of film clips from horror cinema.[11] Goldman and Vogt then brought Cylinder along to Gimlet Media when they started the podcast Reply All, for which Cylinder also composed the beginning and closing themes. In an interview for Hrishikesh Hirway’s podcast Song Exploder, Cylinder revealed that they derived Reply All's opening theme's chord structure 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 hammer shattering a small glass.[12] By episode 16 of Reply All, Cylinder had contributed some 25 audio pieces to the show's music library for use as themes for various recurring segments, as well as music beds to convey moods in the show's journalistic pieces. These themes would grow to number in the hundreds by the time Reply All ran its final episode in June 2022.[3]
Cylinder also created satirical cut-ups from pieces of Reply All episodes that were run post-show as incentive for continued listenership through the podcast's end credits and final ad block.[3] For one season of Reply All, this idea was expanded into a serialized audio story that appeared at the end of each episode.[5] 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. In 2020 Cylinder released the series as the album, BMC and Dog In Space: The Complete Series, via multiple online platforms.[11]
Reply All's success led to Cylinder taking jobs creating themes for more than 60 other podcasts in the next three years, as well as music for film, advertisements, and video games.[5] In 2015, Cylinder collaborated—via Twitter and Dropbox—with the Switched on Pop podcast to reconstruct then-current compositions by Justin Bieber.[13] In 2018 Cylinder collaborated with fellow pseudonymous media artist Zardulu to produce the track "Ablanathanalba" following Reply All's exposé on Zardulu's viral Pizza Rat phenomenon.[14] After an open-source theme for a Changelog podcast appeared in a Disney commercial, The Changelog’s founders commissioned Breakmaster Cylinder to compose and produce the theme music for all of their podcasts as a means of ensuring that their theme music would be unique while also unifying the sound of all of the podcasts across the network.[15] in 2023 Cylinder compiled and released their themes for Changelog’s podcasts into a pair of albums catalogued as Volume 0 and Volume 1, filled by a third one (Changelog Beats Volumes [2]: Dance Party) in 2024.
Breakmaster Cylinder licenses all of their music through their own publishing company, Person B (stylized as Person♭) Productions.[16] Since 2015, Cylinder has curated their assorted radio and podcasting themes into several albums, each titled Songs for Broadcast followed by a volume number. In December 2022 Cylinder announced that the ninth volume would be the last because "it caps a trilogy of trilogies".[17] Cylinder released a tenth volume of Songs for Broadcast to Bandcamp in January 2024.
Many of Breakmaster 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 supermarket produce sections. 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.[4] One of these submissions, "Drumcorpscore" was designed to be a backing track for Britney Spears’ song "Toxic". "Drumcorpscore" and many other of the weekly submission tracks were later repurposed, with samples removed, for use in scoring Reply All.[3] Also in 2017, Cylinder remixed a version of the traditional folk song "Down by the Bay" as sung by popular children's music artist Raffi. Breakmaster Cylinder explained, "That song says it isn't safe to go home because Mom will say some crazy shit to you, which is a weird message for a children's song, but is actually how many adults I know feel about [going home for the holidays]."[5] Cylinder released this, along with two other political songs on the Singable Songs For The Increasingly Enraged EP and included a note encouraging fans to donate to Planned Parenthood, an organization for which Cylinder had previously fundraised with their music.[18]
Breakmaster Cylinder is a proponent of the indie music site Bandcamp through which they make all of their music available to stream or download.[3] A decade of collaboration with rapper Dislotec resulted in a series of singles released from 2015–2019 and an album issued as a reward to Cylinder's Kickstarter backers.[21][22] Also in 2019, Cylinder collaborated with Australian comedian Bec Hill on her live show I'll Be Bec, which was filmed for online video streaming just before the coronavirus pandemic.[23]
Persona
Since Cylinder's earliest contributions to TL;DR, radio hosts have credited the composer as "The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder" and claimed to never have met nor spoken with them, nor to have any knowledge of who Cylinder actually is.[12] Cylinder has perpetuated this mystique of pseudonymity in interviews stating, "I guess the anonymity is interesting", and, "My face (if I have a face) doesn't matter".[5] In the final episode of Reply All, Cylinder revealed that they are a Taurus and have lived in three different sections of the United States.[3]
During his time at Gimlet Media, Reply All host Alex Goldman asserted that he and his staff did not know Cylinder's secret identity. "I found him, or they—we don't really know—on the internet," Goldman said in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. "I contacted him and he agreed to work with us, so long as he could remain anonymous."[24] Jerod Santo and Adam Stacoviak from podcasting network The Changelog exclusively use Breakmaster Cylinder's music to score all of their shows, yet claim to not know if Cylinder is a "guy [or] girl—we're not sure if it's one person [or] many people."[15] For an interview with The Secret Room podcast, Cylinder fielded questions through a mix of flying saucer-style mashups of pop songs and an old Speak & Spell on the fritz.[10] 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?"[12]
It has been speculated on Reddit that 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.[11] When asked about their gender, Cylinder has referred to themself using the singular they pronoun.[6] In photographs, Cylinder appears as a head shrouded in a black motorcycle helmet painted with white bug-eyes that are actually a pair of full stop marks that form the base of two exclamation points.[4] Their head is shown on a variety of different bodies and gender expressions, and occasionally on a manipulated portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach.[4][6] Despite their allure of secrecy, Cylinder has gained repute for responding to fan letters and being easily accessible via the internet.[4]
^Cylinder, Breakmaster (November 17, 2017). "Singable Songs For The Increasingly Enraged EP". Bandcamp. Retrieved July 4, 2022. Track 3 originally released on Big Sleep Records for a Planned Parenthood fundraiser album. Please consider a donation to Planned Parenthood.
^"Great Power Competition and the EU". The Europe Desk. Washington: Georgetown University: The BMW Center for German and European Studies. Retrieved June 29, 2022.
^Zaid, Ezra (February 23, 2021). "EZ on the Money". The Ezra Zaid Project. Retrieved June 29, 2022.
^Koenig, Sarah (April 2, 2019). "88% Parentheticals". podbay.fm. Gimlet Media. Music (in case you're wondering about the music) is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.
