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NOTE
There is a peculiar kind of person who looks at a sheet of steel and immediately sees something hidden inside it. Not hidden in some mystical sense. Hidden in the practical one.
They see the shape long before the first cut is ever made.
Alchemy in Eden creates intricately painted metal interpretations of Sleep Token’s glyph iconography. Every line is measured, every edge deliberate, every layer of paint carefully built upon the last until cold steel somehow begins to feel… alive.
Curiously, none of it began with the intention of making art. It certainly didn’t begin as a business. Like many before him, fascination with the music quickly became curiosity. Curiosity became obsession. And eventually… Creation.
His first piece wasn’t commissioned. It wasn’t even for sale. It was simply something he wanted hanging on what he laughingly calls his “worship wall.”
When people began asking where they could buy one, his answer surprised them.
“I didn’t buy it. I created it.”
That sentence says almost everything.
Steel is an unforgiving material. Once you’ve cut it, there are no second chances. Perhaps that’s what I appreciate most about his work. Not simply the finished pieces, but the patience required to remove everything that isn’t the piece.
Sometimes creation isn’t about adding more. Sometimes it’s knowing precisely what to leave behind. Some might even call it restraint.
As a drummer, it was II’s playing that first caught his attention. Alkaline has a way of doing that to people.
“His style is very unique,” he told me. “You can hear a lot of gospel influence, which isn’t common in metal.”I described what fascinates me most as his weaponization of restraint. Rather than dismissing the phrase, he paused.
“Elaborate please.”It turns out we were describing the same thing from different directions. I called it restraint. He called it attack.
“They hit you in the face then settle out.”Silence, we agreed, is one of II’s instruments.
The pauses.
The microscopic delays.The almost imperceptible shifts in timing that somehow reshape the emotional weight of everything around them. It’s remarkable how often the most powerful moments arrive not from what is played— but from what is intentionally withheld.
Like many of the creators I’ve spoken with, Alchemy never intended to build an audience. He simply wanted to make something that didn’t already exist.
The audience arrived afterward.
He says the biggest surprise wasn’t that people wanted the pieces. It was discovering how remarkably interconnected the Sleep Token community already was.
“It’s so large,” he said, “but seems like everyone knows everyone.”
That observation keeps resurfacing.
People arrive believing they’ve discovered something deeply personal. Then they look up and find thousands of strangers quietly carrying the same story.
Outside of all this?
He works, as he put it, “in the energy sector.”
A sentence that sounds suspiciously like the opening line of a comic book villain’s origin story. When I pointed this out, he laughed. Apparently he has, in fact, been told he has a villain laugh.
Evidence continues to mount. 1
Whether he is secretly building a lair somewhere in the energy sector remains unconfirmed. What is confirmed is that he belongs to a peculiar class of people who encounter something beautiful and cannot simply leave it alone.
The music demanded a response. His happened to arrive in steel.
Perhaps that is why this community feels so interconnected. We keep beginning alone, each of us convinced that whatever the music awakened belongs only to us. Then we make something. We offer it. We look up.
And discover that everyone else has been building, too.
Due to the fact that Alchemy in Eden does not sell his products, there are not any “proper” display images. Photos were (poorly) captured from videos he posted showing off the pieces.
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| Bottom two are same piece, just trying to show the whole piece |
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Fall Into Your Eyes Like a Grave
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You can’t laugh like this and then tell me you don’t have a villainous side. (about 20 seconds in) ↩