Switched on Pop - How podcasting got its sound ft. Breakmaster Cylinder

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

What if the entire sound of modern podcasting can be traced back to a single Grateful Dead song uploaded in 2001? We uncover the musical lineage that connects NPR's classical gravitas to dubstep wobbles, from the very first RSS feed experiment to the mysterious masked composer who's scored over 200 podcast themes and shaped what millions of people hear when they hit play. This deep dive reveals how podcast music evolved from classical public radio strings into today's signature blend of plinking pianos, breakbeats, and irreverent sampling—plus an exclusive interview with the enigmatic Breakmaster Cylinder, the "Hans Zimmer of podcasting" who's been hiding behind a robot helmet for over a decade. MORE Subscribe to our newsletter SONGS DISCUSSED Grateful Dead "Truckin'" Adam Curry "Daily Source Code" theme NPR "All Things Considered" theme Don Voegeli "All Things Considered" original theme (1971) Don Voegeli "All Things Considered" jazz funk version (1976) NPR "All Things Considered" orchestral version (1983/1995) The Daily theme WNYC "On the Media" theme by Ben Allison "Disposable Genius" Christopher Lydon "Radio Open Source" theme by Dafnis Prieto Disparition "The Ballad of Fiedler and Mundt," (Welcome to Night Vale theme) Serial theme Joe Rogan Experience theme Call Her Daddy theme Snap Judgment theme The Breakfast Club theme WTF with Marc Maron theme by John Montagna "Lock the Gate" Reply All theme by Breakmaster Cylinder Breakmaster Cylinder "Outside In" theme Breakmaster Cylinder "Bird Note" (Claire de Lune with loon calls) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm songwriter Charlie Harding and I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Okay, so celebrating our 400th episode this year,

we decided that we were going to rewrite our theme song, right? Oh yeah, it was in desperate need of a renovation. And we looked into all the different ways that a theme song needs to work for a show. But something that we missed was, frankly, the musicology, the history of podcast music as a form. Because just like pop music history, it turns out that podcast music has a long lineage and it has a sound. And I promise you, you're not going to believe where it all started. That's already a more dramatic promise than I could have expected for a show about podcast.

theme music. So I'm sat, as the kids say. Here's the music from the very first podcast ever. Chuckin' got my chips can't stick in. Keep trucking like the dude of man. Oh, less in line. Just keep trucking. The Grateful Dead's Trucking. Was the first podcast ever a Grateful Dead bootleg playback? We're like, wait, what is, this is confusing. So according to reporting by Eric Newsom on Pod News, the Grateful Dead were the first audio distributed by RSS, the technology that makes podcasts possible. Grateful Dead were always very permissive about their taping policy. They officially sanctioned taping in 1984, allowing listeners to bring their own cassette machines and tape recorders to distribute the sounds of these concerts. You know, part of the Grateful Dead's thing is that their music is unique every performance. And so you had to hear every single concert.

Fans were trading tapes as early as the 70s, facilitated by magazines like Dead Relics that gave a form for traders to find each other. But things really took off for the dead in the 90s when people started hosting these tapes on the internet. And let's be real here, the Sound of the Dead aren't the sound of podcast theme music. But I think the ethos of this band, its permissive open culture, really represents what podcasting becomes. Because if we go back to 2001, the new millennium, yes, the dawn of Web 2.0, where open source culture, DIY, revolutionary, democratic blogs are taking over. We find this guy named Dave Weiner. He's this media hacker, one of the earliest inventors of RSS, the really simple syndication protocol that it basically allowed you to syndicate your blog content to any place on the internet.

And he had this pal, Adam Curry, who was a former MTV VJ. who posed the question of, instead of just syndicating our written content, what if we could syndicate sound? Meaning, what if we could easily send people audio files, which would solve a big problem for listeners having to go to all their favorite websites and check to see if there was anything new to listen to? RSS was this magical technology, which allowed you to download content from all your favorite creators onto your computer using a single app. So as an early test on January 11th, 2001, Dave Weiner puts this into the RSS protocol

at the insistence of his buddy Adam Curry and uploads the Grateful Dead song Trucking to his blog scripting news. According to Weiner, unlike the actual Grateful Dead and their recordings, nobody listened to this first distributed kind of early podcast. It was just an

experiment. But not long after, in August of 2004, the creator of this technology, his buddy, Adam Curry, He launches a show called Daily Source Code that documents his life and the evolution of the web, and it takes off, and it really establishes the sound of podcast music. Here's one of the early recordings from October 2004, just three months after the show's launch. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. Friends, family, global dominating world leaders. Welcome to the Daily Source Code. I'm Adam Curry. coming to you from Amsterdam, the Netherlands today.

Many people call Adam Curry the Podfather. He was on to podcasting before it was a thing. Interestingly enough, podcasting, which is a portmanteau of iPod and broadcasting, precedes Apple, who only launched podcasting features in iTunes in 2005, a year after Adam Curry had gotten started. Yes, I actually know where the term podcast comes from. You do? The journalist Ben Hammering.

Yes. Coined it in the Guardian in 2004. Yeah, because I wrote a essay about podcasting for the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory. There's a little plug for... Did you really? To go out and check that out. But I remember that. Ben Hammersley, 2004, podcasting.

Right, when Steve Jobs announces that there are over 3,000 podcasts now available on the iTunes store in 2005, the idea of podcasting had already existed. And so had the sound of podcasting. And that's what I want to figure out today is. What is that sound? How did that original or text evolved to give us some of the biggest podcast sounds and hits of all time? Let's do it, Chuck. Where do we start? I feel like we've started the story in the middle, because obviously preceding podcasting was broadcasting. And I think that Adam Curry's theme song kind of makes a nod to some of the NPR sounds. It's almost like we're transitioning from broadcast to something new and innovative.

The first sounds we heard were those classical strings and those plonking pianos. Things you would have heard on NPR at the time. Six years ago, we reported a story about the morning edition theme revamp. But I feel like we could have looked even closer to their flagship afternoon show, all things considered. We have orchestral horns. We have piano ticking along like it's a newswire. Eventually a sort of jazziness comes in. Exactly.

And I think that these sounds establish a sort of gravitas, which is appropriate to broadcast. But Nate, what if I told you that this wasn't the original All Things Considered theme song? Back in 1971, composer Don Vagely, out of U of Wisconsin's WHA, the in-house composer put together this synthesized composition for the original All Things Considered. According to a report by All Things Considered vaguely used synthesizers like the Moog, which we know from Wendy Carlos, and the VIII. and the Vs 1, the same synth you would have heard on Pink Floyd's On the Run. And he made his music freely available to public radio stations, establishing the sound of public radio first as synthesized music, which makes our fully synthesized theme much more in line with the original NPR sound.

I was going to say, it's very Wendy Carlos, very switched on Bach. Extremely. Well, he takes those synthesized sounds and then applies them to the, theme song of All Things Considered that we now know. That's the 1976 version of All Things Considered, which he then turned into a sort of like jazz funk version the same year. It's not till 1983 that we get the orchestral version that we know so well. And what we're hearing today is actually from 1995, a sort of redone version of the same thing. The theme begins with a lot of curiosity and whimsy, and I think establishes itself with more gravitas moving from the language of

synthesized instrumental music into jazz and then into this orchestral sound. It clearly mirrors the title of the show, all things considered. You tune in and you will hear a global perspective on world events. And you can surely hear the influence of that theme in contemporary news programs like The Daily. Orchestral elements, plotting electronic keyboards. in this case, but kind of like a cousin to all things considered. And this language can be heard all across the sort of NPR universe, like WNYCs on the media, which started in 1993, relaunched in its current format in 2001 with Brooke Gladstone, and became a podcast in 2005. And its theme is right on the mark. This is called Disposable Genius by Ben Allison. And I love

that it uses those same elements. We have the horns. We have the plunky, orchestral sounds, we have a mixture of traditional orchestration and jazzy harmony. Yeah, Ben Allison is a hugely accomplished jazz bassist whose discography with his band Medicine Wheel is incredible. Check out a mantra, for instance. One of my all-time favorite tracks. We don't have to play it now, but just for the people out there. Okay, so this is like the sound of public radio. And when the very first podcast launches, it's not a surprise that it uses the same language. You might be confused because there's like a lot of different starting points of when the podcast started. The Grateful Dead was like a little RSS experiment done by Dave Weiner. Adam Curry,

who came up with the idea for it, put his show out in 2004. But in 2003, Christopher Leiden, a journalist who had worked at WGBH and WBUR in Boston, puts out an audio blog with an interview of Dave Weiner and starts to regularly distribute a program called Radio Open Source that has a theme song that sounds a lot like NPR Corps. I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source from the Watson Institute at Brown University. Hey, Brown University. The Watson Institute, where I took classes when I was a student.

That's a pretty hip little theme there. It is. You're saying that's the first podcast ever? It had a lot of different places. It started as a blog. It went to radio. Eventually, he starts hosting it on his own at Brown University. It's got this beautiful theme by Daphnis Prieto,

a Cuban-American jazz performer. So it takes that language of the jazz gravitas and the plunky piano and adds global sensibility, I think, to this theme. That's crazy. Ben Allison and Daphnees Prieto, man, these are like some downtown jazz cats, like bringing the heat to the early podcast musical landscape. Very surprising, but I'm here for it. Just to be clear, open source, which is the first podcast to launch, doesn't actually adopt a theme song until 2008. But that's still way before. I knew it. I knew it.

This is suspiciously hip for the first podcast ever. That makes more sense to me. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think with these public radio-associated shows, we get a lot of that early language of podcast theme music that Adam Curry is nodding to, right? The orchestral elements of classical and jazz and those plonking pianos that we hear at the beginning of Adam Curry's theme. But as podcasts are to take off in the early 2010s,

New formats emerge and the language of the podcast theme needs to expand, especially as podcasts move into the world of fiction. That's the ballad of Fielder and Munt by the band Dispiration, and it's the theme song to Welcome to Nightvale, a podcast that launched in 2012, really fun show. I don't know if you ever listened to it, but it's a fictional radio show that takes place in the not real desert town of Night Vale. I've definitely heard of it. I've never tuned in. Now that I've heard the theme music, I might have to. It's so cool. I mean, this theme song, I think, really captures the feeling. It adds this really spooky droning element. It adds these sort of breakbeat drums that are moving along at this slow tempo. But the constant here is that plonking piano that we've just heard throughout all of these themes. And it's going to stick around. Okay, mysterious ambient textures. Minor key, mootiness and that plonking piano you described. I mean, this is the playbook that will be followed

by the biggest blockbuster podcast, maybe ever. Yeah, serial. Fast forward two years, 2014, we take the sort of fictional narrative world of Welcome to Night Vale and merges the magazine journalism of This American Life, which, by the way, doesn't have a theme song. It just uses the sort of jazz Django Reinhart style sound for its soundtrack. This American Life, they launched this spinoff show called Serial, and it launches with this famous theme. Okay, so this is incorporating so many of the sounds that we've been hearing so far. Yeah, you know, the plonking piano, double P, P, P, P, that's at the very forefront here. Right.

But then we've also got those orchestral elements in there, some strings, some horns. We've got this interesting percussion that's kind of reminiscent of some of those early public radio themes as well. It's not just like a drumbeat. It's something like a little more elemental in the mix. And then we have these harmonies that are kind of unsettling shades of welcome to Nightvale, perhaps. It's like a petty brew of so many of these podcast theme elements we've encountered. I didn't realize this back in 2014. When we started podcasting and we were listening to Serial, I thought this was totally new, something we had never heard before. In many ways, it absolutely was. But the music was part of a much longer lineage.

Okay, I'm very persuaded by your whole chronology so far, Charlie. But if we go back to that or text, the Daily Source Code podcast from Adam Curry, there's another element of that theme that we haven't really discussed, which is not so much the NPR public radio side of things, but the shock jock aspect of that theme song. Right. Because right after we have the opening classical strings, we get this snippet of a pre-recorded voice saying something. That's an intellectual.

And then it's like electric time re-rear. And he comes, hey, I'm Adam Curry and blah, blah, blah. And you're like, oh, wait, am I listening to Z-100 or whatever? It's like that is another part of the story of podcasting as well. So maybe there's a musical corollary there too. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. Friends, family, global dominating.

World leaders, welcome to the Daily Source Code. I'm Adam Curry. Yeah, and I feel like that attitude is so important to podcasting. It is that open DIY aesthetic. Anybody can participate. It's rebellious. And so that side of Adam Curry's theme embraces the sound of rock, hip hop, electronic music, things which are cutting edge, pushing boundaries, revolutionary. And that's the aesthetic that so many podcasts use. One of the biggest podcasts of all time that started in 2009, the Joe Rogan Experience, has that same shock, jock, rock and roll kind of quality. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan.

Another one of the biggest podcasts of all time, Caller Daddy. Same exact style. It is your founding father, Alex Cooper, with Call Her. Caller Daddy leans a little bit more into the sound of hip hop. That FM radio hip hop sound we also hear on the podcast. snap judgment. It's the same kind of vibe that we hear on the most important hip-hop podcast, the breakfast club. I'm a homeguard that knows a little bit about everything in everybody.

You don't know if you don't lie about that, right? Lauren came in. But my favorite rebellious anthem has got to be WTF with Mark Maren, a show that after 15 years is going to be ending very soon. Lock the gates. Lock the gates. Are we doing this? Really? Wait for it.

Are we doing this? Wait for it. This theme song written by John Montagnan of Brooklyn is so DIY. It is so podcast. He documented his process for YouTube years ago. And that cool strumming sound is a violin bass, like the style of bass that Paul McCartney played. And he's strumming it with a pick like it's a guitar, micing it with a microphone, while also plugging it in and blending those sounds together.

He's using kids' toys to create his drums. It has that anyone can do it kind of quality, just like the world of podcasting. I'm a what the fuck, Nick, you know, a proudly card-carrying member. And I can hear how the sort of anarchic messiness of that theme reflects the free-spirited conversations that Marin has on that show. That's very cool in itself. But then I'm like zooming out and I'm thinking, Wow, I kind of take podcast music for granted, when in actuality, it is subtly kind of setting you up for the kind of material you're going to hear in the conversation or the narrative that follows. It's not just a placeholder or something to, you know, remind you to, hey, turn up the volume on your iPhone before that someone starts speaking.

It actually, like, serves a thematic function, which is not something I maybe really clued into before. Right. And so if we go back to our text, Adam Curry's podcast theme, we have the gravitas of classical and jazz, the plonky curiosity of piano. We have the rebelliousness of contemporary music. And if there's a theme that unites all of them, it's got to be Reply All by PJ Vote and Alex Goldman. Reply All was Gimlet Media's biggest hit. It was a podcast about the internet. And they needed a theme that sounded like the internet. And I think that they succeeded. I mean, this is like that early Web 2.0, wild Democratic, drawing from the Adam Curry playbook. It was made by the pseudonymous composer, Breakmaster cylinder. Breakmaster made these weird, quirky beats with the sounds of box harmonies, hip-hop breakbeats and basses, and plenty of curious, whimsical plonkiness. Gotta have that plunk.

Through the voice of an actor, the pseudonymous Breakmaster cylinder, explained. his process making this theme to Song Exploder. I had some weird thing where I was just, I was obsessed with Bach. Prelude in C is basically what the reply-all theme is. Yeah, it follows the same chord structure. It's the first four measures, but instead of playing each individual 16th note, you bring it all into one chord. So what you can do is you can take one measure,

and you can block it into one chord, so it's this. And the second measure is this. and third, and fourth. And then it goes the first four measures. I remember when that song, Exploder, interview came out. Yeah, and it was one of those light bulb moments. It was like, oh, I've been listening to this podcast. I keep hearing this core progression.

I never connected it to Box, Prelude, and C. We're kind of back in that public radio world of merging the highfalutin sound of classical music. Right. With these more contemporary digital sounds. And in this theme, they're even kind of more raucous. It sounds like glass shattering at certain points. But it's that mix of high and low that really, like, motivates that podcast. And the reason I love listening to it is because it always alternated between some really powerful insight into technology and the way it shapes our lives.

And then some really crass joke between the two co-host. So maybe the theme sort of mirrors that dynamic. And the show was so popular that it launched a career for Breakmaster Cylinder. All along, we've been talking about our foundational text. But who are our foundational composers of what modern podcasting sounds like? We've discussed a few of them. But I'd say if there's a Hans Zimmer of podcasting, it's Breakmaster Cylinder. Breakmaster has gone on to compose over 200 podcast themes.

Breakmaster Cylinder has a whole music library that podcasts draw from to soundtrack the background of what's happening underneath narration. Breakmaster Cylinder has made themes for Voxes Today Explained in the Verges Decoder, both within our network. And way back on one of our earliest episodes, we actually did a collaboration with Breakmaster where I sent emails back and forth trying to create a made-up Justin Bieber song.

It's really fun. I recommend going back and listening to it. But just the other day, I got an exclusive opportunity to actually talk to the real Breakmaster cylinder. We're going to hear from the Hans Zimmer of podcasting right after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. Do you mind just introducing yourself to begin? My name is sort of breakmaster cylinder. Sort of? I mean, my parents didn't name me Breakmaster cylinder.

They're not that insane. Where were you born? What was your childhood like? Earth. Hazy. Yours? Earth? Pretty good.

Yeah. All right, pretty good. There's always stuff. It's pretty good. How did podcasting even happen for you? Um, Alex Goldman. What did Alex Goldman do? Uh, former host of Reply All, current host of Hyperfixed.

He listened to my albums and he saw weird things I put on YouTube and when day he tweeted, if I ever have a podcast, I will have Breakmaster Cylinder write my theme song. They started calling me the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and that I think works on people. Everyone likes mystery. Is there a mystery behind Breakmaster Cylinder? I mean, as much as there is behind Charlie Harding. I probably know less about you than you know about it. me. But I don't know. A long time ago, I was like hosting a online thing where a bunch of people

played things and I got a helmet because the person I was with was like, don't let those weirdos find us. And they were right. And then I just like it. But the helmet's really uncomfortable. That's why I'm not wearing it. Is it fun to be mysterious? Yeah. Yeah. Actually. Yes. Are you daft punk? No. I'm like crap daft punk. What does the education of Breakmaster cylinder look like. Formal piano lessons. Really? Which turns into some kind of, clearly like some kind of self-study and music production and how does, what's the next step?

Yeah, that's true. Writing techno songs for my friends in high school using fruity loops three. Which evolves into talking to Charlie Hardin. No. No, I just, I don't know. I got, I get addicted to sounds and artists and styles and then I replicate. them. I'm definitely autistic, but didn't realize this until like an hour ago. I just need my brain to be soothed all the time and writing music does it. Well, okay, so you scored lots of

different things. One of the things you do is that you have scored a ton of podcast themes. Someone approaches you. They want a theme. You're mysterious. How does this thing happen? Like, sure. They send an email. A claxon goes off in the ship. One of those fire poles, I take one of those fire poles down to the studio. I read the email. The email will be very straightforward or say something completely insane. And, you know, you tell me the show you're doing and what it's about and how you want it to feel when people listen. And you either use that, you know, you use musical language or you don't use musical language.

And both are totally fine. I get a lot of people apologizing for not knowing. Like, I meant to say C-sharp. or I meant this minor, but I, you know, one guy was like, can you redo the base but make it feel like it sort of nurtured you as a child and you grew up with it? Another one was like, this needs to sound like sex in the city or maybe 90s Baruch assault, like feminine, but like we go to church and don't wear underwear there. Also, we're in a coven. That is almost an exact quote. And clearly that didn't leave my mind for how could it.

Can you disclose which show that was? Yeah, it was girls, girls, girls, girls, girls. Girls, girls. The first one has an apostrophe. How'd the theme turn out? Oh, they liked it. Could you break down what are the components of what needs to go into a podcast theme? Typically, you end up with marimbas and cello plinks.

I listen to a lot of break cores, so a lot of like break beats and things. some wubby, synthi, something. There are certain instruments that are like the tropes of podcasting. You mentioned Rorimba. There's a funny video going around the internet right now that's like, if you want to sound intelligent, all you have to do is soundtrack, Marimba. So like what are the go-to things? What are the instruments you avoid?

What are the instruments you lean into? Well, leaning into, I used to just make a lot of experimental techno, so I'm all about, and like hip-hop beats. So I love drums and bass. I love break beats. I listen to a lot of square beats. pusher. And I played a lot of classical music when I was a kid, so I like harmonies and things intertwining. And that's kind of what breakcore and break beat music is about anyway,

fitting sounds into things and making it kind of, you know, I don't know, man, assembling a puzzle. But yeah, everybody loves marimbo's. More than marimbas, I love pizicado strings because you can use VSTs to make them very easily and they don't sound bad. Software plugins instead of having to, you know, blackfield. If you try to make like a legato viola line, you can tell. It doesn't sound real. It's fake. Right, but if it's poop, boom, punk, punk, tongue.

Harder to tell. Okay. It sounds. I like round sounds. It's kind of like the bass also. Why do you feel like that round sound quality works for soundtracking? God, it works for everything. Because it makes it feel like the bass has nurtured you from a young age.

And it's holding you in its round bubble of, I don't know. Cello is cool because it's sophisticated but also it has that bass. And round sounds are really pleasing like sound wave, I mean sign waves. And some of these Nintendo sounds we really like grew up with some

of us. Yeah. The podcast music is all about moving things along and hopefully not saying too much especially if you're doing scoring because then what they say over it with the talkie, talkie, talkie, that will either, it'll probably say what they want to say and you're just supposed to be the backup. Yeah. Or sometimes it's the

other way around, but mostly that. Do you feel like you have a theme that you are most proud of that is out in the world? There are a few, I guess, probably. The first one that came to mind is outside in. They were like, make Appalachian hip hop. Oh. So I got to play dirty, like, one string guitar because I couldn't find the other strings. And it was just like some really rough sample, little, you know, folksy kind of stuff. And then I just put it over beats. And it was a show about nature and such.

So I have bird sound records that I got to scratch back and forth. So it had just like an outdoorsy. Yeah. This is very you. I think there's something so wonderful about the breadth of things that you scored. Like I imagine you've scored more podcast themes than anybody else. At least. Maybe.

Like major podcasts. Oh, maybe. I know with all the indie ones where we are approaching 200 or we've hit that. It's somewhere around. 200 shows. That's amazing. Over like 11 years, I guess that is a feasible number. But yeah.

I'm feeling like a little bit of hesitancy of like accepting that you have like really heavily put your fingerprint on this sound of podcasting. There are a lot of podcasts, man. You haven't scored all three million or however many exist. I haven't even. No. No. I don't know. I mean, like, it does help that what was the golden era of I was there for that, you know, 2014 or something. It just sort of. Which, it feels like it's changed. Oh, I don't know. There are many more, but I mean, if you're going to say I have a fingerprint on the entire thing, maybe it's just because it was at the start. It was at the right moment. But yeah, I don't, I don't. Yeah. You have a sonic fingerprint. Like, I know it's one of your tracks. They each fit different shows, for sure. Like, I love the Appalachian hip hop vibe of outside. side in. It communicates that we're going outdoors, but also that we're not afraid to have a little

fun. This is not a naturalist bird watching podcast that's just pure serenity and ASMR talking. But we're going to have a great time outdoors. Yeah, do everything for the joke. I like having a good time. Although I did do a song for the show called Bird Note, where they wanted me to do Claire DeLoon using only Loon noises, which is like so on the nose, but it's, oh, so good. This is so you. Only you could pull this off. Well, probably other people could, but I embrace it real briefly. It's also, like, jarring to listen to. It's an annoying music. I really like it.

I once in an interview for, I think it was Audubon magazine, about the use of loon calls in popular music. The loon call happened to be, like, on an early sample pack or something. And so a bunch of dance music DJs started putting it in their records, thinking that it sounds like an exotic bird, you know, from, like, tropical regions, when in fact the loon is from like northern North America. From down the street. The loon is the least exotic bird.

Yeah. It's such anachronism. It's also like jarring to listen to. It's an annoying. You did a thing like a decade ago where you made almost like a hip-hop interlude mixtape of NPR hosts that I loved so much. It was like, I'm Lakshmi Singh. From NPR News in Washington, I'm Lakshmi Singh.

Oh, yeah. I was trying to make just the hardest drops with, you know, and it's a joke people do already, but yeah, yeah, but yeah, just for NPR News in Washington, I've watched me seeing it just. Boom. Yeah. But I think this is what I love about what you bring to the sound of podcasting. Like there really is a brakemaster cylinder sound that I recognize. There's always these baselines that are abrasive and unfiltered, like a single square wave oscillator or something just. in your face.

Good. Okay. There are the most over-compressed kick drums that just hit like an old boom bat beat, but then are going to be diced up in totally unexpected ways. I love this description already. There's always some organic elements that are beat flipped and sampled. And again, hitting you with a lot of irreverence. Like, it's chopped up in a way that you don't expect.

And so there's just playfulness. playful and heavy at the same time kind of suggests that like you're going to have a good time listening. That sounds great. I would love it to sound like that. That's awesome. Love me some boom-bap. Love me some unexpected shops.

The podcast ecosystem is completely open and I don't really love using the word democratized because there's a lot of fascists that make podcasts as well. But there's kind of like this it's this open, very loose association of lots of different shows and then like lots of those big shows and some of the independent shows

smaller ones too, all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's that common sound. I feel like your sound gives podcasting a certain charm and irreverence. It's lovely. I'm so glad. Is that where you're going for? What are you going for? Would it be something that I want to listen to over and over? So what? Charm and irreverence. Sure. Whimsy. I try to insert that everywhere. That's the loftiest way you could, I would love for that to be true.

Whimsy sounds, I feel like whimsy has a bad rap. Like it sounds like, it's kind of, whimsy is like a thing which is, uh, it's not serious. Yeah. But no, whimsy, well,

no, is it serious? It sounds too light and fluffy. It sounds light and fluffy. The full phrase for me is always, fuck yeah, whimsy, because like,

it's just, let's go full forward or something and things are worth doing just for the joke. And I don't know. Cool. I, that's nice to hear. Full forward whimsy. It feels like the character that is built around this also supports that

whimsy. I think of a picture of Bach with a beetle helmet. It speaks to a sort of older version of the internet where there was a lot of anonymity of quirky people. Now everyone's just trying to show off how beautiful they are. But for a long time, there were, you know, these wonderful weirdos making hilarious things. Yeah. In the sort of open source era of the internet. It reads to that sort of quality. Why did you lean into this anonymity of Breakmaster cylinder? Because, uh, I don't know. Why you got to know about me? I'm going to stay over here. I'm fine. I am, I'm a recluse. No, I'm private. Yeah. I don't know. It doesn't, people keep asking like, why am I anonymous, but I'm, you know my name already. It's Breakmaster's founder. But over time,

your relationship to it has evolved, I guess. I'd love to know more about that. I think back to a very early collaboration you did with Reply All and Song Exploder. And you come in through via translation of an actor. We collaborated a long time ago, like 10 years ago, on a song that was kind of a Justin Bieber sound-alike joke song. It was such a joy.

much fun to work on. And I feel like we never spoke. And if anything, maybe there's some, like, robot voice representing what you say? I can't remember exactly how we spoke. It's possible. Back in the day, it was much more serious about, like, even people I worked with behind the scenes in a professional capacity, I'd still be like, I will meet you in this chat. You can speak, but I will type. And my video feed will just be this lemur getting belly scratches on endless loop. What changed over time? I'm looking at your face this. time. I know. I don't usually do this. Oh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. So anyway, um, okay, so I'm looking at a pillow of your helmet. Someone made this. Someone put together a pillow that looks like your logo. That's cool. Yeah.

Yeah. What? Oh, uh, my, the helmet's so uncomfortable. If I, if I do video of myself, if I make little, you know, TikToks or whatever. So you, so you're not daft punk, but you, you're, you empathize with them and why they might have disbanded solely because wearing a helmet in public is very uncomfortable. Is that why they disbanded? No, I don't think that's why, but it could be a significant contributor. Well, yeah, no, the helmet is too uncomfortable to wear, so I don't go out. I'm happy here on the ship. Do you have any strategies for avoiding the paparazzi?

I don't have paparazzi. I mean, is that because of anonymity? Yeah, I guess. Okay, no, so once or twice someone has found my actual house and sent a picture. of it to me. Oh my gosh. Wait, what? Yeah, they're like, hey, guess what? You're not as anonymous as you think you are. But both of them were really cool and like, here's how we can help erase some of your internet footprint. But yeah, I don't like that so much. That makes sense. Not answering questions. That's how I do it. What do you want to be doing going forward? We're going to

hear more themes, more soundtracks, more mixtapes. What's the future got for? Frankmaster cylinder. I just want to do something interesting. I like weird work. Weird work. Yeah. I mean, like the last thing I did that I got really excited about was a Mad Max thing. And that was like just pure joy. I took a 13 minute car chase scene from the beginning of Fury Road. And then I erased all the audio. And then I, you know, second by second replaced it all. And it was like three solid months. And it was just the happiest been in the wild. Wow. Wait, where do I hear it? Uh Not on YouTube

Oh, breakmastercylinder.com has a little Picture of Immorten Joe at the bottom And you can click on that Now all the warboys make bird noises Which really felt appropriate But I didn't I don't know I think breakmaster cylinder is kind of its own genre

All right There seems to be An endless amount of creativity That pours out of you You're immensely prolific Yeah, no, I'm just itching to do more of this stuff. I just want it to be stuff I haven't seen or heard before and that's

kind of hard to do. Like we've I would love to invent a new genre and it's so like you can go back and explore and study genres and find how they were built from other genres and think about in you know 1977 how could I have known hip hop

was coming or something or like the year is 1964 how do I invent punk? Sorry I mean 74 come on now. It's like you're a chemist in a lab trying to synthesize new sounds. I guess, but I don't do a lot of trying to synthesize new sounds exactly. I just, I really like all the different kinds of things, and I like all the extremes,

and I like noticing the math behind genres, how this is this plus this, but they slowed it down and took out. They slowed the drums down. You know, rock steady made simpler is reggae, and then minus everything almost. except the drums and bass and added effects makes dub. And then dub sped up is like drum and bass. It's just like, you could just follow it forever and ever. But why can't you figure out how to do the next step?

I want to make music that was going to happen anyway. Is there anything that we can do to further reinforce the mysteriousness of Brickmaster cylinder? Yeah. Take all my audio and have it re-spoken by 90 different people. And just cut it out sentence by sentence and stitched. Oh my God, I did an interview like that once. Really? Yeah.

But I just used song lyrics. And I just, whatever I wanted to say, I just found, you know, that. It took a long time. It was stupid. Clearly, they weren't asking me anything in real time. It was, they'd send me a wave file of a question. And I'd be like, I'll tell you in two weeks. It seems like you have a lot of fun.

Oh, my God, it's so much fun. I just want to keep having fun. I like music. Let's just keep doing that. Give me something to do. Truly one of the most odd interviews that I've ever attempted. Really? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's too bad. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, I want your interviews to be weirder than that. Thank you. This has been truly a great joy. Thank you. I'm so happy to talk to. Thank you for sharing about your mystery and your music.

You're welcome. Let it continue. Okay, you too. Let Charlie continue. Okay, before we get out of here, so much of today's story, and frankly the sound and voice of this podcast comes from public radio. Public media was recently defunded by Congress. People depend on public media for essential news and weather alerts in addition to all their

really fun podcast programming. I believe it's essential to support your local station. Before you go on to do your next thing today, take a second and make a contribution to your local station. Okay, here's the credits. You know, there were so many podcast theme songs that I wanted to listen to. Our listeners emailed and messaged us so many recommendations. I couldn't get to them all, but I will be writing up about them in our newsletter.

People can find that in our show notes and on our website. And while you're there, last week we asked for the worst lyrics that you've ever heard in your life in the history of pop. Because we want to do a show about them. People are talking about it on our substack and our chat. There you go. So go to switchonpop.com or go to our show notes. Sign up for our substack and you can submit your own worst. lyrics ever, and we will do our best to dissect as many as possible.

Switch on Pop is produced by Raina Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon Farlin, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb. Our theme music is by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Archiris, really putting us in conversation with the whole history, podcasting, such great stuff. We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and production of Vulture, which is part of New York magazine. You can subscribe to nymag.com slash pod. We'll be back again on Tuesday, and until then.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.