One of the primary MO's of the new Handmade Birds imprint appears to be releasing limited edition reissues of cult underground metal albums in highly attractive new packaging designs, such as the recent reish of Blut Aus Nord's Mort. This new Lp version of Desolate North from forest-doom shaman Celestiial is in the same vein, presenting the music from the original Bindrune Cd release with new artwork (by Faith Coloccia of Everlovely Lightningheart/Mamiffer) in a beautiful gatefold package that features black and white woodland photography for the album art, limited to only 250 copies. The Cd edition has been out of print for several years, so at the moment this is your only chance to get a physical edition of this album. Here's the original write-up that I did for the Bindrune release back when that version came out:

The one-man primordial deathdoom band Celestiial slooowly drifts through an ethereal woodland terrain that's alive with the sounds of rain and chirping birdsong, forming an ominous atmosphere that is very similiar to Skepticism in its stately lumbering, but Celestiial is more organic and mystical, more like a cross between those Finnish funeral masters and the fragile druidic doom-folk of Chet Scott's projects (Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Svart Ugle, etc). Actually, as the album progresses, it loosens it's tethers to the doom form, mainly through the distant hiss of slowly pulsating cymbals and barely discernable drums and the buried drone of the almost non-existant guitar. The dreamy death growls blanketed in reverb are similiarly distant and blurred, while the woodland sounds are at the forefront, the grey haze of rainfall and wildlife sometimes obscuring the beautiful Windham Hill-style New Age string and flute arrangements and heavier passages. That's not to say that Celestiial isn't crushingly heavy, which it is...the heaviness here is a suffocating ambient dread, a witnessing of the impermanent self surrounded by nature. Desolate North contains 8 tracks that work together as a single 45 minute suite, and the album is definitely best absorbed in it's entirety. Highly recommended to followers of the funeral doom ambience of Nortt, the otherworldly ooze of Esoteric and Disembowelment, and the Glass Throat family of dark sylvan droneology.