This track features the ‘sounds’ of impacts from microscopic dust grains as recorded by the Fields Experiment on the Parker Solar Probe. The dust grains, which originate from comets and asteroids, collide with the satellite at high velocities, creating plasma clouds which may be subsequently detected by the Fields Experiment.

The dust impacts are a simple yet beguiling sound, somewhat reminiscent of the sound of a needle on 33 RPM vinyl before the music starts. It is a sound with terrific forward potential.

The music for this piece, one of two long works on the album, is derived from work Kim Cunio undertook setting parts of the Louvre’s collection of Egyptian Antiquities for a touring exhibition that came to Australia some years ago. The Hymn to Ra is based on the great myth of Ra, one of our earliest myths of the Sun.

Ra is the great deity of the Sun. In the 5th Dynasty he was associated primarily with the noon-day Sun, portrayed with the head of a falcon and a solar disc inside a cobra resting on his head, almost like a halo. Ra travelled on the Atet, (sometimes called the boats of millions of years), through the sky and the realm of the dead in twelve-hour cycles. Many hymns were sung to Ra in this period and while they were not preserved Kim Cunio’s work into reconstituting early textual and iconographic collections (The Dead Sea Scrolls and the instruments of the Second Jewish Temple for example), serve as a potent methodology for this work.

The music is composed in the hijaz scale with a finely tuned augmented second interval low in the scale to create an ascended disembodiment. We hear the sublime voice of soprano Heather Lee (also heard on the track 'One Star Awake'), in single and duo lines as well as a 4 part choir intoning the name of Ra, made up by Lee and Cunio. Cunio also plays a taqasim (free scalic exploration) on the wooden flute at various points in the work. The word we work with is the word we know would have been heard, the name of Ra.

The abstract artwork by Scarborough is influenced by the heat of the Sun. Using colours of the Sun with hints of landscape and figures, it presents a visual interpretation of the music, the lyrics and the Sun.