“Jeff Mills — Trip To Vega” Album Review
Set in the year 2097, “A Trip to Vega” documents humanity’s last exodus from Earth, after a catastrophic planetary transformation that makes life unsustainable. Decades of disasters, including pandemics, wars, resource shortages, and a devastating solar event, have luckily survived, but this crisis has no solution. The shifting of the tectonic plates within the Earth’s core has generated a powerful harmonic frequency that incrementally destroys the senses and cognitive functions of nearly all beings. As the phenomenon intensifies, humanity faces a dark reality: within a year, most people will suffer extreme neurological and psychological decline, making survival on Earth impossible.
Having no way to stop the planet’s deterioration, a fleet of enormous spacecraft begins transporting humanity to Vega, a habitable star system located 25,3 light-years away. Even though some decide to remain behind out of fear, disbelief, faith or attachment to their home world, most recognize that departure is their only chance of survival. Carrying around one million passengers each, the vessels embark on their unprecedented journey across the cosmos. “This is not a precautionary tale, as there is nothing to learn. Instead, a decision has been made, and a Trip To Vega is the consequence”, the description of the album concludes.
If I were given the choice, it would be hard to decide whether the album stands as a soundtrack to humanity’s departure from the planet or as the documentation of what preceded that futile decision - the track names and the press release suggest the former. The album trades all expected or possible forms, genres, and instrumentation to offer a deeply conceptual and futuristic use of synthesizers. Sci-fi tropes, outwardly strings, and altering rhythmic structures are employed to substantiate Mill’s conceptual vision. I don’t know if I'm assuming based on personal experience, but the Wizard has always had a primal and unique impact on my brain, constantly messing with my thalamus and turning auditory data into vision when they reach my occipital lobe. His musical genius offers a wide alternation of emotions and stimuli when listening to this album, cementing that the concept of transporting us to this dystopian future was achieved.
But is, actually, this dystopian reality a future prophecy, or are we experiencing it right here, right now? Having just survived a massive pandemic, the climate anxiety, geopolitical tension, the global retraction to fascism and racism, the ravaging acceleration of technology are painting a gloomy reality for the inhabitants of our planet, with few grasping on their privilege as the panacea that may save them, while dooming the rest. Mills' album and its concept are a direct validation and critique of our reality, of our society. It is a cry for “now or never” on the choices that we are faced with, even in our mundane, seemingly unimportant everyday lives and existence on this small dot in the cosmos. Are you going to evolve and be one of the people who will choose to enter the spacecraft, or are you going to insist on defending the old ways and the systems that plague our existence, stubbornly remaining on a rapidly dying planet and vile beliefs?
Jeff Mills is one of the very few artists who have treated electronic music as an endless canvas of exploration and has fused its anatomy with cosmic imagination. For more than three decades, the Detroit visionary has treated space not merely as an expected theme but as a means, as a framework for understanding humanity itself. Inspired by science fiction, astronomy, the unknown, and blending scientific concepts with cinematic storytelling, he suggests that techno, much like space travel itself, is about finding the courage to move into the unknown, adhering to a constant search for possibilities beyond the limiting boundaries of the familiar. “A Trip to Vega” is no exception - it stands and will stand as an inspired piece of poetic science and expression of Afrofuturism.
The Trip to Vega will be released on June 19 via Axis Records. The 11-track record is available as a triple vinyl (3LP) and via all digital platforms.
Tracklist:
1. Destination Bright Star
2. Ten Cycles
3. Omega Dust Rings
4. Lyra
5. Equinox
6. Twenty-Five Light Years Away
7. March Of The Purple Orbs
8. Terraform
9. Alpha Quadrant
10. Orbiting The Star
11. Circumstellar Debris
