Encephalon releases their new album, Echoes via Artoffact Records
Cult Ottawa industrialists Encephalon have unveiled their first album since 2017’s We Only Love You When You’re Dead. This, their fourth album, Echoes features 11 tracks, including their latest single, “Someone Else’s Dream.”
With over 300K streams, Encephalon is definitely one to watch!
Listen to Echoes below, and find out more about Encephalon via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
Encephalon is a progressive cyberpunk band from Ottawa.
We mix aggressive industrialized dance music with emotive songwriting that has a sci-fi theme, usually involving life or consciousness developing beyond the mortal shell. We started in 2005 and played our first show at Zaphod Beeblebrox in Ottawa days after The Rolling Stones filmed a music video there.
We are all self-taught and the 3 of us produce all aspects of our records ourselves including mixing, mastering, and artwork, despite having a great label who would happily take care of it all if we chose.
Tell us a bit about your most recent release.
Our newest album Echoes has been years in the making and our first since 2017s We Only Love You When You’re Dead. Echoes is the most electronic and melodic album we have created, less typically “industrial” than our previous, with more of an emphasis on synths and vocals. Echoes is meant to sound like a love story on the battlefield of an android war that takes place in a fracturing simulation. It is heavily inspired by my time spent in virtual reality as well as some great video games about androids such as Nier: Automata and Detroit Become Human, and of course a little Philip K. Dick.
Echoes is made for our fans, with lots of references to earlier works that should hopefully leave them questioning the nature of reality and if the music of Encephalon is real or just another layer of a simulation they may or may not be inside right now.
When it comes to the global pandemic, how are you keeping yourself out in the public eye while not being able to perform?
We are a cult band who tends to avoid the public eye at all times unless we are actively promoting something or performing, you need to be incredibly cool or nerdy to know about Encephalon!
Canadian Beats is all about Canadian music, so if you were able to work with ONE fellow Canadian artist, alive or dead, who would you choose?
I think that would be Ken “Hiwatt” Marshall, who has mixed and produced lots of the later Skinny Puppy records. I actually didn’t know much about him until recently when he started a great youtube channel for audio production. Seeing his workflow has been very inspiring, and it’s pretty obvious his style had heavily inspired us already. He just seems like a cool Canadian dude who likes Skidoos and nature and just happens to make the techiest cyber-sounding productions ever, I think we’d get along.
What’s your goal for 2022?
Write music and play a few smaller shows. We might consider performing live soon but I’m not quite convinced that we’re out of the pandemic yet and that this isn’t still the beginning of the end of the world. For a smaller band like us to book and then have to cancel a tour at the last minute, it would be devastating financially. Hopefully, 2023 will be different!