Breakmaster Cylinder

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. 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.

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. 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. By episode 16 of Reply All, Cylinder had contributed some 25 audio pieces to the show's music library for use as themes in 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. 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.

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. 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". Cylinder released a tenth volume of Songs for Broadcast in 2024 and an eleventh volume in 2025.

Albums and collaborators

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.

Cylinder has also been known to use their craft to mess with public radio culture as heard in their parodic remixes of radio themes such as that of Morning Edition. A reviewer described Cylinder’s mash-up "The NPR Drop" as "a wonderfully bizarre amalgamation of dubstep, Lakshmi Singh, and the All Things Considered horns."

Breakmaster Cylinder is a proponent of the indie music site Bandcamp through which they make all of their music available to stream or download. 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.

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. 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. 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." 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?". Cylinder answered many questions regarding their desire for anonymity and their history of obscuring their appearance and voice, yet remained evasive about their identity.

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. When asked about their gender, Cylinder has referred to themself using the singular they pronoun. Their head is shown on a variety of different bodies and gender expressions, and occasionally on a manipulated portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach. Despite their allure of secrecy, Cylinder has gained repute for responding to fan letters and being easily accessible via the internet. AFK (Changelog) All Consuming The Axe Files (CNN Audio) Battle Born Tech (KNVC FM) Be Less Typical Bleeped Business Casual (Morning Brew) Business/Disrupted The Changelog (Changelog Media) Completely Optional Knowledge Crazy Genius (The Atlantic) Darknet Diaries Dedicate It Discomfort Zone The Ezra Zaid Project Fabulous Flying Merkins (Indaba) Founder's Talk (Changelog) Gender Reveal Get More Smarter` Girl's Girls (Curvy Girl Media) Go Time (Changelog) Hit Enter: Stories from the Inbox Hyperfixed (Radiotopia) Imagined Life (Wondery) Jobs Club Meat and Three (Heritage Radio Network) Methods Moonshot (Lawson Media) Outside/In Ohrensessel Otakon Sandwich Podcast (Sandwich) Sanity Podcast Signl.fm Special Relationship (The Economist) Sorry, What? The Third Web Time Well Spent We The Ppl With Good Reason (Virginia Humanities) You Can't Do That 88% Parentheticals (Gimlet Media) 100% Related? (Gimlet Media)

Albums

Spasmodic Symmetry (2006) Dolomite! (EP, 2009) Remix One (2009) Say Hello to Klaus (2010) Musique Pour Les Pubs De Nourriture Pour Chiens (2011) See You Around (EP, 2011) BMC: Remixed (2011) Tokyo (EP, 2012) Blithering Heights (Mixtape, 2012) The BMC Fine Ringtones Collection (2013) Remix Two: Short Attention Span Theater (2013) Big Schnitzel (EP, 2013) Pineapple Princess (EP, 2014) Pickled Beets: Part I (2015) Songs For Broadcast: part I (2015) The BMC Fine Ringtones Collection: 2nd Issue (2015) Pickled Beets: Part II (2015) Songs For Broadcast: part II (2016) BMC: Live From Gimlet's Executive Washroom (2016) Songs For Broadcast: part III (2016) I Wanna Hear The Music (EP, 2017) Pickled Beets: Part III (2017) BMC ONE: Video Collection 2007–2017 (2017) Songs For Broadcast: part IV (2018) Singable Songs For The Increasingly Enraged (EP, 2017) Songs For Broadcast: part V (2018) Blithering Heights 2 (Mixtape, 2018) Songs For Broadcast: part VI (2018) Remix Three (2018) Mono Planet EP (2019) Songs For Broadcast: part VII (2020) BMC and Dog In Space: The Complete Series (2020) Breakmast of Champions (2020) Dead Legends (OST, 2021) Songs For Broadcast: part VIII (2022) Songs For Broadcast: part IX (2022) Mr. Stockdale (OST, 2023) The Moon & All That (2023) Changelog Beats Volumes : Theme Songs (2023) Changelog Beats Volumes : Next Level (2023) BMC's Voicemail: Fall 2018 (2023) Polter Pals (OST, 2023) Songs For Broadcast X (2024) Changelog Beats Volumes : Dance Party(2024) 12 Months (OST, 2024) Slash Quest (OST, 2024) Changelog Beats Volumes : After Party (2025) Changelog Beats Volumes : Dance Party(2025) It's clipping., bmch (EP, 2025) Songs For Broadcast XI (2025)

Collaborations with Dislotec

Singles "Solfeggio" (2015) "Superflypapertrailblazer" (2016) "Warning Signs" (2018) "Tiny Marshmallows" (2018) "Pitbull" (2018) "Westwood" (2018) "I Don't Wanna Talk To My Neighbors" (2019) "Zombies" b/w “Eject / Reject” (2019) "Dollar Of Damage" (2019)

Album

Tiny Marshmallows (2026)

Contributions to other media

Computer Show (scored "computer music" for 1980s TV spoof) Life's Wonders (RV series composer) MetaLetters DAO (Metaversal) Our Story - The Indigenous Led Fight to Protect Greater Chaco (contributed original music to 2022 documentary film) Pakistani Reactions (theme for video series) Slash Quest (Green Pillow/Noodlecake Games)