
Mission to the Sun — Sophia Oscillations
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.
