Review: Empusae - The Alchemist's Rift

Artist: Empusae

Album: The Alchemist's Rift

Label: Arcane Dirge

Release date: May 2025

Following a series of collaborations with notable dark ambient artists throughout 2024 - including such names as Peter Bjärgö, Pilgrimage to Pleroma and Onasander - Empusae is back with a solo album, his seventeenth (!) standalone full-length release in a career spanning over two decades now. The latest brainchild of the ever-prolific Belgian artist Nicolas van Meirhaeghe is adorned yet again by cover art created by the talented French artist Christel Morvan aka nesisart, in a rather unusual style for dark ambient, which only whetted my appetite even more. The booklet of the physical release even contains a short graphic story by the same artist that expands on the concept of the album, which I sadly didn't have access to for the purposes of this review.

According to the label, The Alchemist's Rift is something of a return to the roots, in the sense that Empusae uses sounds and compositional techniques that hearken back to his earliest days and releases such as Error 404 which put him on the map in the first place. While this is true to a certain extent, particularly in the artist's use of noise, static and other elements from the harsher end of the sonic spectrum, make no mistake - this is undeniably a modern dark ambient album, in the most positive sense of the word. In a way, the album feels like an exploration of all the different aural expressions that Empusae has espoused over the years, sublimed into a single narrative. While his previous releases felt more focused in terms of both theme and sound, The Alchemist's Rift casts a very wide net over the artist's various influences, giving the album a strong sense of presence and grandeur. This is not dark ambient for quiet introspection in the night, but rather a cinematic and thoroughly engaging piece of art. Compositionally speaking, there's a lot going on here: strong industrial rhythms, eerie synths, field recordings, various types of static and noise, all marinated in a rich sauce of melodic drones, piano passages and occasionally even wind instrumentation. Just like the cover art suggests, it takes someone with a lot of experience and a very keen mind to bind all these disparate elements together into a coherent whole, and that's exactly what Nicolas - sometimes barely - manages to do. Indeed, if there's any criticism that can be levelled at The Alchemist's Rift, it's that it sometimes seems almost too ambitious in scope, with overwhelming effect on the listener, particularly in tracks approaching the 10-minute mark, and I caught myself several times wishing for some of the amazing intro/outro sections in the more classic dark ambient vein to have been given more time and space to grow and develop on their own.

Of course, my preferences are my own, while the artist has his own vision, and there's no denying that this vision is competently and thoroughly presented on The Alchemist's Rift. It's clearly the work of a mature artist that was painted with a sufficiently broad brush to be enjoyed by most genre aficionados, even myself who am admittedly not the biggest fan of rhythm-driven dark ambient. Just as importantly, this thick aural soup seems to reveal new ingredients with each listen, which gives it a lot of replay value that'll keep you coming back for more until Empusae releases whatever is next on the horizon. Knowing Nicolas, we probably won't have to wait for very long.

Rating: 8/10