Veteran industrial ambient musician Nicolas Van Meirhaeghe aka Empusae has teamed up with Mattias M. Van Hulle, alias Pilgrimage to Pleroma, for this collaborative album on esteemed gothic ambient label Cyclic Law.  It is a short release for the dark ambient genre, with three tracks totalling nearly twenty six minutes.

A dense, cavernous drone quickly forms as the album begins, in which can be heard monastic choral long tones, wordless or too obscure to be discerned.  There is an immediate sense of cold vastness, as typical of music on this label.  The album takes on a very filmic quality as a repetitious drum beat enters, first a tom-driven pattern from a drumset, and then a rising cadence that sounds as if played by a large group, which I could only describe as "war drums".  The crescendo continues until an abrupt drop-off that ends the eight-minute opening track, "Impulse".

The six-minute second piece, "Opening of the Strings", immediately continues the emphasis on heavy percussion, this time taking greater influence from metal with a grinding fuzz bass tone.  This is the sort of music that might be used to accompany volcanic hellworlds in games, akin to the soundtrack of the first Diablo or Trent Reznor's soundtrack to Quake.  I can also imagine it as a soundtrack to a dark HBO historical drama likeThe Tudors or Rome.  However, I feel like they have chosen the most obvious preset genre sounds for 'dark ambient', and that the ambient cloud space here is perhaps overly muddled with random distorted clutter.

The eleven-minute third track, "The Rope Revelation", is the most pleasantly abstract of the three, absent of drums and generally focused on e-bow drones and reverberant singing voices.  Crumbling melodic feedback from a heavily reverberant distorted guitar creates a sensation of gradually breathing in and out of different melancholic chordal spaces.

Though the deep subterranean atmosphere is competently established, this album represents an overly safe and predictable direction for Empusae / Pilgrimage to Pleroma and Cyclic Law, providing a rather generic dark ambient atmosphere without much to distinguish the album from hundreds of others.  The drums, in particular, are done in an uninspired cliche manner that makes the recording less immersive.  Though there are many sound layers, they are presented in a soupy muddle that has no particular space carved out for each.  I am left feeling like it is not the most focused or distinctive work, which ends before really creating an individual identity.  It is lacking the exactitude of artists like Lustmord or Inade, or the best releases from Cyclic Law.