Mission to the Sun — Sophia Oscillations

[ Felte — 2023]★★★★★

Reviewed 10 July 2023by Colin Lang

Detroit seems to have always had a special relationship to the darker, weirder, and frankly, creepier, side of electronic music, and Mission to the Sun is no exception. The band’s name might lead you to believe we are traveling somewhere aglow, but once you make it through the sludgy, slow journey of their second album, Sophia Oscillations, it is abundantly clear that whatever mission – and whatever sun, for that matter – is one fueled by despair and desperation and not hope. Each of the eight tracks features recurring elements – voice, some form of damaged synthesis, and carefully strewn sonic ephemera – creating a kind of threadbare symphony for a blighted future. The disease that informs such compositions is right at home in the muffled vocal delivery – bassy but insistent – and the circular structure of each track. Things do not so much develop as return again and again to a point of origin, a cause, really, an etiology of downfall.

The slow pacing on Sophia Oscillations is consistent throughout and contributes to the overall moody nature of the beast. Either it will take an inhuman amount of time to reach our endpoint, or more likely, there is no teleology because we are already post-pestilence, at least it feels that way. The calculated restraint is worth mentioning, because it saves the album from ever tipping into sentimentality or false reconiliation, which must have required immense concentration to pull off. No screams or cries for help, just a slow narration of a landscape over which only ashes now grow.

For fans of dark, spoken word industrial sounds with sparse, at times minimalist, electronics. If you ever wondered what Kraftwerk’s Trans Europa Express would sound like post-apocalypse, or under the despotic rule of a newly founded alien state, this is for you. To drive into the darkness for yourself

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