���A superior album of terrifying black soundscapes, Foehn is the first release from the duo of Fr�d�ric Arbour (the man behind esteemed dark ambient label Cyclic Law and a member of the ritual ambient group Havan alongside Harlow from Funerary Call) and Montreal drone artist Christian Corvellec (AKA Skinwell). Inspired by the desolation and harshness of arctic environments, Skorneg's debut ventures into some supremely bleak and nightmarish territory. The opening title track kicks this off with a swirling black fog of murky orchestral rumblings and distant howling, everything immersed in a thick haze of reverb and delay, with blasts of rhythmic metallic sound echoing in the depths. It's a pitch-black dronescape, those distant howling voices shifting into fearsome choral sounds that have been stretched and muffled into vast smears of seraphic horror. The slow, spaced-pout blasts of metallic percussive noise bring an additional weightiness to Skorneg's abyssal symphony, as this gradually evolves from those spacious eruptions of reverberant clank into a steady, almost militaristic throb that slowly comes into focus behind the opaque blackness. Fragments of eerie melody flit in and out of view, creepy half-formed figures that float languidly through the vast cavernous expanse of Skorneg's lightless depths. With this opening track alone, the duo delivers some of the most unsettling black ambience in recent memory.

��� The other three tracks on Foehn delve into similarly blighted soundscapes, revealing strange mechanical rhythms and clockwork pulsations amid squeals of backwards guitar-like sound and slowly undulating waves of black symphonic drone, slipping into some surprisingly propulsive passages of industrialized sound at times. Gusts of ghastly swarming noise spreads out beneath buzzing high-voltage drones and deep, fluttering bass frequencies, and on the closing track "Sherpas", the duo drift out into a softly smoldering expanse of ritualistic whispers and rhythmic crackle, the dimly luminescent glow of the clustered synth-drones and stretched-out choral drift swirling in slow looping movements around strange clanking noises, almost like some murky, Philip Jeck-ian turntablist exercise beamed back from the shores of the river Styx. In fact, I picked up on a little of that Jeck-like vibe all throughout Foehn, and anyone who dug his darker works like An Ark for the Listener should definitely check out Skorneg's ominous subterranean loops and stygian drift. Of course, anyone into the jet-black ambient recordings of Yen Pox and early 90's Lustmord, or the more abstract fringes of horror-movie soundtrack orchestrations will want to hear this exquisitely-composed obsidian epic, as well. Comes in a four-panel digipack, limited to five hundred copies.