A Lifetime of Puppetry (Nova Spire Remix)

Matt Gifford was five when he began making sound collages and loops on his sister’s cheap Radio Shack keyboard. At eight, he asked a friend whether he was really alive or part of a simulation built to test him. By grade 8 he was writing music with Sam Mainer, and when Mainer got his first synth at about 13 and quickly mastered MIDI, the two had their first electronic band, with Gifford loading his guitar with so many effects that he was using its strings as oscillators. Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly shaped the way he saw the world. “Ain’t It Dead Yet? pretty much lived in my VCR,” he told I Die: You Die in 2011.

Encephalon began in Ottawa in 2005, when Gifford and Mainer set out to make what he later called “a dumb EBM band.” By 2006 there were so many of those that they started reaching for psychedelia, soaring vocals, odd time signatures and epic song structures. Their first recorded song, ‘Teenage Hitman’, took its lyrics straight from a medical dictionary. Stefan Herwig heard their first demo and, within months, ‘Responder’ was on Septic VI, the 2006 compilation from Germany’s Dependent, a label the pair had loved since before the band existed. At home, Ottawa’s industrial crowd favoured pulsing rhythmic noise and machine rock and had little patience for weak EBM, so they kept the beats hard.

Labels twice closed up shop on them. Dependent itself went dark for a few years, and Gifford went back to school. The songs kept travelling anyway: ‘Rise’ was used in the cyberpunk film The Gene Generation and the horror film Necromentia, and more compilation tracks followed. Alis Alias came aboard on vocals, keyboards and visuals, and in August 2009 the band issued the seven-track Drowner EP themselves on CD-R through Data Shifter Productions, with cover art by Alias and Gifford. When Dependent reopened, the first thing Gifford did was send Herwig all of their remaining material.

Six years after the band formed, The Transhuman Condition appeared on Dependent in Europe on October 28, 2011, and through Artoffact Records in North America on November 8. Krischan Wesenberg of Rotersand remade ‘Rise’ and worked on ‘Daylight’, Fractured and Famine joined in on ‘Face First’, and Gifford and Mainer handled everything else. The concept came last. Picking the final track list, Gifford decided the album still needed one big club song, so he wrote the title track, tied the record’s themes together in its lyric and threaded in samples of the philosopher FM-2030 discussing life extension. Failed vocal chains on stage had pushed him toward singing clean, and live, Mainer now took the vocoded parts while Gifford and Alias sang the clean ones over a visuals-heavy show. I Die: You Die named it the best album of 2011.

Psychogenesis, released by Dependent on April 24, 2015, was partly a reaction against the debut’s pop leanings. Gifford blew the song structures up to enormous size, added huge orchestras and guitars, and wrote a convoluted story in which one consciousness takes over an army of self-replicating machines and spreads across the universe. ‘Biological’ lurches on a stop-start tempo, ‘Outbreaker’ runs on overdriven guitar chords, and Alias wrote and sang ‘Genomica’. Gifford felt it drew less buzz than the debut, especially in Canada, although I Die: You Die ranked it second for the year. The band brought that side of themselves to Calgary’s Terminus: Gravity festival on July 31, 2016, opening with the outlandish ‘The Descent’ and playing a set heavy on deep cuts, with Alias taking bigger turns at the microphone.

The deaths of so many musicians in 2016 gave them their next story: what if an artist like Kurt Cobain were resurrected and forced to play a pop star for eternity? We Only Love You When You’re Dead followed on Artoffact on October 13, 2017, a return to the Canadian label Gifford found easier to reach. Its unwilling Lazarus is rebuilt from corporate-sponsored parts and turned on by the public when he rejects the spokesman’s life, while ‘The Calvin Klein of Slime’ packs its lyric with trademarked brand names. Where the first two albums had taken six and four years, this one took about 18 months, and Gifford deliberately cut back on the clean singing and key changes that had been the band’s calling card. For a club track like ‘Lunacy’, Gifford wrote a simple EBM song, sang it and sent Mainer a basic remix kit, then marvelled at the enormous electro production that came back. The slow, epic builds were Gifford’s own. By 2018 Encephalon’s live shows featured Gifford and Alias, surrounded by backing videos that animated her artwork. Artoffact’s artist biography also identifies Mainer as a member.

Gifford and Alias released Ominus Spiritus, a gothic doom album as Headless Nameless, on Artoffact in November 2021. Encephalon’s fourth album, Echoes, arrived on June 3, 2022, led by ‘Someone Else’s Dream’, their synth-poppiest song since ‘Drop Dead’ in 2011. Gifford drew freely from outside industrial music: the video game Detroit: Become Human inspired ‘Deader Without You’, Bonnie Tyler inspired Alias’s showcase ‘Emulations’, and the instrumental ‘My Heart Will Not Go On’ owed a debt to Nobuo Uematsu and Celine Dion. He built ‘Slime Never Dies’ entirely from two inexpensive Behringer synths and a Behringer drum machine, and sequenced the album like an Iron Maiden record, with the title track as his ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’. The question he had put to a friend at eight runs through Echoes, and the album turns it on the band. ‘Braindead in VR’ quotes lines from across the catalogue, and ‘Echoes’ reworks the melody of ‘The Transhuman Condition’ before a narrator reports the failed experiment and the loss of a subject named Ghostorm, the alias Gifford had used for years. Gifford said the song suggests that Encephalon was a manufactured dream about to be forgotten. The deluxe edition’s bonus disc, Surfacer, reached back to the real beginning, with ‘Responder’, ‘Teenage Hitman’ and ‘Ghostorm’ among its early demos and outtakes.

‘Last Day at the Institute’ appeared on June 21, 2024, with the band’s first full-production video, made by Cory Gorski of Volt 9000, whose work for Bill Leeb and cEvin Key’s Cyberaktif had convinced them to hire him. It opened Automaton All Along, released February 21, 2025, in which a dying humanity tries to preserve its legacy through synthetic life and an artificial intelligence wakes to the question of what it was built for. The music is quieter than before: the dreamy half-time of ‘The Machines’, the laid-back prog of ‘Illusions’, Alias’s deep voice set against Gifford’s processed one on ‘Like the Real Thing’, and the chopped breaks of ‘Guardian’. Two weeks earlier, a band whose members had been Front Line Assembly fans since the 1990s turned up on Front Line Assembly’s Mechviruses, adding new vocals to ‘Molotov’. In December, I Die: You Die made Automaton All Along its album of the year, 14 years after doing the same for the debut, and described “Listen to Encephalon” as a mantra for the site. ReGen ranked it 19th. Juan O. of Nova Spire, who had remixed ‘Lunacy’ in 2017, turned ‘A Lifetime of Puppetry’ from the debut into a haunting, atmospheric piece for a digital single on August 1, 2025.

On January 30, 2026, Encephalon joined fellow Ottawa act Antigen Shift on ‘The Fog’, a single that resurfaced that June on Antigen Shift’s Verified Unidentified. I Die: You Die heard Encephalon’s slow burn in it.

-Robert Williston

  Nova Spire's version of Encephalon's "A Lifetime of Puppetry" transmutes the original's industrial metal intensity into a haunting, atmospheric soundscape. Nova Spire retains the track's core emotional weight but reinterprets it through intricate electronic textures and a subtly shifting rhythmic pulse, adding layers of intricate sound design that evoke both vast, open spaces and claustrophobic inner turmoil, ultimately creating a more introspective yet equally powerful experience. lyrics So goes the quest
From furthest east to farthest west
To live a life you could call blessed
But underneath what you suggest
Is not as divine.

High, high as the wind may blow
Low, low as the deepest undertow
I tried to uncover you
Now I discover that you are a light

That lives in shades
You shine so bright
As colours fade out of this life
So just tonight please shed some light
On a lie so black that you call white

High, high as the wind may blow
Low, low as the deepest undertow
I tried to uncover you
Now I discover that you are [redacted]

There's no time to sleep
I can't count another sheep
That wastes its potential
Waiting on a fucking miracle

I wont close my eyes
I wont live a life of
Fear for future punishment
I will cast my own judgements

Burn among the trees
I find room to breathe
Drawing my conclusions
Free from foreign illusions

And if I look back I still see
A lifetime of puppetry
Hollow dolls who fail to see
Whose hands their strings do lead

Lead us from explanation
Deliver us from an equation
That will cut us free
That will cut us free

I wont close my eyes
I wont live a life of
Fear for future punishment
I will cast my own judgements

There's no time to sleep
I can't count another sheep
That wastes its potential
Waiting on a fucking miracle