As I recently mentioned Aural Hypnox to introduce the output of another Finnish sound artist, I checked in the pile of releases that reached my desk to something by this knowingly interesting imprint and I found this awesome release, that got released by the end of 2018 in a strictly limited edition of 440 units. I sincerely hope some of them are available yet, as the delight that lovers of ritual dark-tinged ambient sonorities by listening to Eremos, Coptic word for 'desert' and title of this album by Arktau Eos, a bicephalous Oulu-based project whose makers, A.I.H. and A.I.L., besides hiding their real identity, describe as a pact, could be boosted by its evocative sounds. Some followers of the label and the Helixes Collective consider it as the most important project under Aural Hypnox label at the moment, and the quality of this artifact can not be but a confirmation of its good reputation. As you can easily guess, the conceptual framework, to say it so, is solitude, seen as an almost necessary passageway to transcendence, intuition or as a transitional state to a higher level of consciousness and awareness, as the title, the inscription in the in-lay ('Per Solitvdinem Ad Astra'), the title tracks and the whole dynamics of the album, whose moments sound like the aural translation of a spiritual process departing from the catching "The Liminal Pilgrim" - the evoking track by which Arktau Eos let slip their out by delayed bleeps, electronic slithering, a sinister chant and other aural entities - and the eloquently titled interplay of "Facing The Exarchs of Desolation" to the final "Eden", chorally seem to suggest. The description they made about this album and a comparison against their previous outputs got provided by their author and is pretty eloquent: “As has been the testimony of wise men and women of all faiths, solitude bestows its own distinct gifts upon the seeker, a process here treated in less intimate terms than on the voice-led Catacomb Resonator. Ermos is more expansive; the desert that opens before the listener is not a locus of temptations or simple retreat, but a vivid inner mindscape of dramatic confrontations and transformations between flora, fauna, stellar matter, earth, and stone. Gradually they shed away the humanness in its most banal sense, until man identifies with the scorpionic voice of power that carries to the ends of the earth – and cosmos”. One of the most interesting feature is the double bridge they inoculated: a "time" bridge between archaic and modern as they combined (sometimes easily recognizable by trained ears) old synthesizers and ritual acoustics and a "space" bridge as they injected some fields recordings in this release, grabbed in two different moments in the woods of Northern Finland and in the steppes of Mongolia.