BM Artwork

So let me start here by choosing one of the many covers that fueled the fire in me long ago: Songs of moors and misty fields by Empyrium.

I got in touch with the album quite early as I started diving into the genre almost 25 years ago by now. A former acquaintance handed me over loads and loads of material, some quite straight forward BM, others a bit more atmospheric BM or avant-garde. One of them this one, the second full lenght of Empyrium. And as far as intuition can go, I immediate felt this cover expressed an cardinal feature of what I was looking for in the genre. A dive into melancholy, set out towards some epic images of nature, as if that one monolith feeling is shattered into a myriad of colors and associations that set things in motion in a way that is hardly expressible in words. All we see is a shadowed tree that bents itself towards the sky, suggesting the vastness of the lonely landscape all around, sometime during sunset. The cover manages to capture the promise that's contained withing the album's title and fits the music like a glove, as if it were the visual representation of that 45 minutes of mournful melancholy music. The picture does not take up the whole of the cover by which it points even more towards image presented here. As if to say, let's not just take some nature imagry and fill all of the available space with it, but let's take a focal point, a window by which you enter this experience.

A few years ago I lucky to witness them live at 'The Casino' in Sint-Niklaas where they performed the full album with the convintion they must have had when releasing the album about 20 years earlier. Certainly matured somehow, perhaps rediscovered the strenght and impact of it. At the end I got myself the artbook of the album that comes along with some interviews, images and reflections about the band and specifically this album of course. The work contains a bigger picture of the cover, a photograph by Jürgen Holzhausen, and the reinterpretation of it by Fursy Teyssier which first ended up being the cover of the reissue LP 2015. Furthermore, the work contains some references to the artwork stating: "As the album title would suggest, so delicately represented in the sepia-toned cover artwork, Empyrium celebrated the inherently gothic imagry of fog-drenched fields and depictions of the jilted, tragic lover traipsing across the moors. Equally dramatic in sound, Stock's carefully crafted melodies, deliberatly paced and shimmering, painted melancholic sonic depictions of nature and lost love."

https://www.lycanthropia.net/empyrium-songs-of-moors-and-misty-fields.php?smode=y