A remastered collection of tracks and remixes released by Encrypter in 2021.

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[ALBUM NOTES]

01 Barker Street

Named after the iconic session house I lived in for a while back in Waterford. This track was originally written as an attempt to try and capture the feeling of listening to Boards of Canada alone in my room as the sun came up over the river out my bedroom window (having not slept all night of course). Everything in this bar the drums was made with one synth, the affordable and not too shabby first edition Roland JU06 boutique. I challenged myself to write the whole thing with one synth and 5 notes. I really love the way this one came out. It's another that was lost to the ether when my laptop was stolen but I once again luckily had a bounce in my Dropbox. Previously released on the Brain Food: Oddities (Hi Rob!) compilation which was techno producers doing non-techno things and also featured in a documentary on Limerick's club scene called One More Tune (find it on Vimeo - Hi Ellie!).

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02 Bribery - Holy Diver (HDRMX-PGR1)

I remixed this track for Bribery somewhere around the start of 2021. After I sent it to him, I got the response you kind of do and don't want to get. Something to the effect of "sounds sick... is there any of my track in there?" Don't worry there is. The repeated "no more" vocal refrain which you hear is lifted from the original track and there's other percussive elements and randomised vocal stabs in it too. The title HDRMX-PGR1 comes from (funnily enough) Holy Diver Remix (and less funnily enough) Pirate Ghost Rave (because it sounds like what pirate ghosts rave too obviously). Something I've tried doing more in recent times is adding in some sort of daft element into my tracks. A really naff sound that borderline just does not fit. I was thinking about this the other day and trying to figure out what the appeal is and I THINK it's my way of trying to recapture some of that early naivety I had when making tunes back in the day. You know the type of track that you listen back to and go "this is sort of shit but also I don't hate it"? It's maybe a little bit of that and also a little bit of trying to use the sounds other people wouldn't touch with a barge pole. Sometimes naff is nice.

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03 Last Rites

This one came about from my live rescore of Dawn of The Dead back in 2020. It was first single I released in 2021 as a bit of a challenge myself and Bribery (Hi Mitch!) set ourselves to get some consistency in our release schedules. A single a month for the year was tough and I even missed the very first month of it. This tune originally soundtracked the tenements scene from Dawn and features a cheeky sample (aren't they all cheeky?) from the movie in the breakdown.

"You are stronger than us but soon I think... they be stronger than you."

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04 Slapper

JV2080 slap bass on a doomy electro track? Sometimes naff is nice. No big story on this one. Just my attempt to be funky. Imagine if the cast of Seinfeld got set upon by a gang of cenobites. This track has nothing to do with that but if you're interested in the idea my screenplay is available to option. Hit me up.

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05 Bruxalist

This was a bit of a one-take wonder on the hardware. I'm pretty sure this was written, performed, and the first draft edited in less than an hour total. It's a raw one and as a mate once pointed out (Hi Damo!) the synth's got "resonance you could floss your teeth with". Bruxalist is a portmanteau of the words bruxism and brutalist. It has no hidden meaning. It just looked cool on paper.

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06 Sympos - Pints Of Creamo (Last Sup Remix: Dropped Pint Version)

The saviors of the Waterford punk scene (Hi Sympos!). We did an EP on the SEQ ARP label (RIP) with three remixes of tunes from their debut EP. Their EP is probably one of my favourite releases of the last few years. Go listen to it. It's fucking great. Anyway, I decided to make a big fuck off doomy version of their tune and sucked up my fears and added some layers of my own vocals in there too. When I revisited these tracks for the remaster I found I was a little let down with how this one sounded and I really wanted it to be more balls to the wall. So I slammed it through a load of clipping and tape saturation to make it more gnarly. If you don't like it piss off and listen to the other one. The decision to make stuff this distorted is hard. I'm constantly battling my own instincts when it comes to making these sort of decisions. I absolutely love the sound of horribly distorted music. It's legitimately one of my favourite things in the world. Yet, when it comes to my own stuff, I find myself taking a cautious approach. I think Bribery is probably the person who has helped most in that regard. There is a man who truly does not give a fuck what people think when it comes to distorting stuff. It's inspiring.

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07 Tír nAill

Tír nAill is Irish for "The Other Place" which is another name for Tír na nÓg. A place beyond this world from Irish mythology. I'll fully admit there's no deep concept here and I just wanted to have something that sounded a bit cool and paid some respect to my heritage. I've probably gotten it wrong though (I was never very good at Irish in school). This track was actually made from the stems of an earlier song released on the Trawl EP called Night Terrors. If you listen to that you might pick up on some of the recycled sounds. This one has undergone a journey. It's seen some shit, man. Night Terrors was made out of mostly sampled sounds from Dawn of The Dead (before I did the rescore for it) and recorded mostly live from the Octatrack. When looking through old files about a year after releasing Night Terrors I discovered I had recorded all the stems and forgotten them. I then built a new track in Ableton from them and bounced it out to collect dust as I'm prone to do. But THEN my house was burgled and my laptop stolen. Gone were all the original files for this track (back then called Spook). When I was looking for things to release in 2021 I found an mp3 of it in my Dropbox so it underwent an edit and a master... and NOW another remaster.

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08 Anise Snout

An older track from maybe 2018 that I revisited for a single (and now revisited again for this remaster!) This one features a vocal lifted from an iconic video from my hometown of Waterford (Koma Cribs Waterford Edition No Issues). Anise Snout itself is an anagram of the phrase "not an issue". If you know you know. I've always loved the processing on the bass on this track. It's Ableton's Operator synth running out through an Analog Heat and being filtered live.

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09 Boar

Another one-take wonder. I knocked this one up after borrowing a drum machine off a mate (Hi Rob!) and just jammed on it through some distortion. I did one recording and left it on my hard drive to gather digital dust and be forgotten. One day when I was flicking through recordings off my hard drive with a mate listening in (Hi Dave!) who complimented the track. I had to laugh given how quickly the track had been written (even faster than Bruxalist I reckon). Sometimes the ones where you just capture that raw energy in the moment are the best... aaaaaand sometimes you just chuck distortion on a drum machine and people think it's cool because distorting things IS fucking cool and really smart.

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10 Tír nAill (Dep Affect Remix)

The only thing I dread more than getting an email or a message from someone I've done a remix for asking "where are my parts in this" or "this isn't what I was hoping for" is getting a remix of one of my tracks back from someone and it being vastly better than my own track. Well... Dep Affect send me through this and I literally just sighed and quietly said "fuck". I love this remix and I've actually played this out in my sets more than the original because it's an absolute banger. El Deppo is godlike when it comes to making doomy hardcore and techno and this track is a shining example of his legendary remix skills (go and check his remix of my track Fucker for another example of how he ruined my ability to view my original track as anything but a dollar-store, run-down, hand-me-down version of his glistening dancefloor destroyer).

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11 Harvest

My single for Halloween. Zero promotion or even acknowledgment that it was released for this one. To be honest, you've probably never heard this track because only about 5 people have played it on Spotify (let that be a lesson to you). 100% this is a tough sell as it's mostly droning noise and weird vocals for 7 minutes. I still love it though. This was one of those late-night experiments of layering drones and noise together trying to create a thick fog to lose yourself in. This originally came from an idea I had of taking the notes I had made from a fairly oppressive spate of nightmares I was having. As soon as I woke up from one, I would try my best to make a voice memo of what had happened in the nightmare. Then, once I had collected enough of them, I wanted to make some layers of abstraction to see what would come of it. I ran the memos through some dictation software which struggled to come up with accurate versions of what I was saying but it wasn't enough. I needed to make it more abstract. We had to go deeper! I took these poorly dictated nightmares and ran them through a Markov chain based text generator which takes text input and creates new text based on the probabilities it has discovered in the supplied text. Now we're cooking with an abstract frying pan full of rubber moose lips! I took this text, ran it through some TTS software, and distorted it (which was both cool AND smart) and then layered it in with some drones and some clanking from the Resonant Garden (gear drop). Why is it called Harvest? I have no idea. New Markov Poetry was the working title but I hated that. Suggestions on the back of a post card.

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12 Meew

Named for the mythical beast that haunts the dreams of the enfant terrible director Jovan Atanackovic (who also provided the wonderful neo-contemporary mixed digital media artwork for this release). This track was actually one I recorded live during one of my Instagram streams in 2020. I had initially intended to release this as the first single of 2021 but I had a crisis of confidence and for some reason I couldn't bring myself to do it. I tried and tried to edit it down to a more palatable "single" but no matter what I did I wasn't happy with it. So here it is, presented in all its unedited glory. For you and you alone, dear reader. As I was putting these tracks together for the album I stuck this one at the end which I thought was fitting as it was meant to be the first and then ended up the last. Getting to the end of the album and then realising it still has the recording of me saying "Thanks! Seeya!" made it even more fitting.


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Thank you to everyone who supported my music and came to my shows over the last couple of years. It honestly means the world to me. If you've read this far, I have little doubt that you're one of those people.