���After six years since the release of their acclaimed Disintegration album, Australia's master of dark ambient have returned with this stunning new collection of post-nuclear New Age driftscapes and vast solar-blasted ambience. Since the turn of the century, Terra Sancta's Greg Good has been crafting some of the most immersive dark ambient music around, drawing heavily from classic Teutonic space music forms (with definite influences from early Tangerine Dream and Br�der des Schattens � S�hne des Lichts-era Popol Vuh emerging throughout his sprawling compositions), but ultimately creating something much more vast and desolate and terrible, majestic driftscapes formed from billowing clouds of grainy sound, grim orchestral synth-strings sweeping across wind-blasted wastelands, solar winds ripping across ruined cities, the deep woodwind-like thrum of his drones stretched and diffused into titanic rumblings and tectonic groans. It's some of the most evocative and fearsome dark ambience I've been following.

��� As with his previous albums, Exile evokes an endless desolation, sun-blasted deserts and vast tundras, the warm red glow of an irradiated sky hanging over a dead black earth, the atmosphere at once filled with dread and moments of striking beauty. And on the track "Celestial Extinction", we get one of Terra Sancta's most terrifying works, a collaboration with fellow Malignancy Rasalhague that descends into vast Lustmordian blackness and bottomless wells of orchestral doom, the nearly eight minute track filled with subterranean murmurings that echo thunderously throughout the depths, the sound grim and cinematic, a powerful abyssal ambience streaked with sinister horn-like textures, cello-like drones that are seemingly suspended into infinity, growling apocalyptic tones draped over endless waves of threatening minor-key drift. At those moments and those that follow across the latter half of Exile, Terra Sancta can be just as malevolent as anything from Yen Pox or Lustmord, uncovering monstrous subterranean symphonics, washes of fearsome choral power and vast rhythmic industrial churn that all becomes blurred into an ocean of stygian black drift, but Good imbues his bleak textured ambience with a weight unique to this project, and which makes parts of this album seems as sonically heavy as any doom-drone outfit. Highly recommended.

��� Comes in a six-panel digipack with striking artwork designed by Kerry Braud of Rasalhague and Maculatum.