Heath Yonaites- Rim of the Sun

Artist: Heath Yonaites
CD Title: Rim of the Sun
Label: Trimvirate
Reviewer: Matthew Johnson
Date: 9/18/05

This CD from artist and composer Heath Yonaites is a sort of concept album in four parts, evoking a journey through space. Between the ultra-groovy digital art and the “Star Trek” stoniness of the concept itself, you could be forgiven for expecting something tripped out and New Age, but this is actually an engrossing experiment in ambient experimentalism and found sound collage. Starting off with the ungainly-titled “Lacus Somniorum Sinus Aestuum,” the album is spacey, to be sure, but richly textured, with layers of extended ambient passages adorned with beeps, snippets of radio frequency, and well-placed analog glitches. Title track “Rim of the Sun” is fuzzier and more deliberately random, with sampled found sound squeaks, half-heard conversations, and enigmatic buzzes, while “The Oort Cloud” comes closer to industrial ambient with its emphasis on metallic ringing drones and occasional clanking sounds. “Chandrasekhar Limit” ends the CD on a suitably intense note, starting off with thick, vaguely ominous electronic atmosphere punctuated by muffled clicks before building into a seething convolution of mutated speech, broken chimes and thunderous rumblings. For a recording based around such cold and abstract landscapes as deep space, this is an unexpectedly organic album, crafted not only with digital effects but also a diverse collection of such everyday objects and sounds as wine glasses, burning logs and water sizzling on a hot frying pan. The result is something at once alien and familiar, and is engrossing throughout the length of its four epic tracks.