From Gustav Holst’s "The Planets" to David Bowie’s immortal Space Oddity and even to space ambient white noise, our fascination with the endless expanse above transcends musical eras. Now, it’s time to add Iowa City’s Sun Centauri to the pantheon. The duo’s debut EP, Flux4D, blends otherworldly soundscapes with smooth R&B creating captivating future pop that catapults you straight into the galactic void (all while maintaining a killer sonic groove).
Alyx Rush and Jim Swim (aka Alex Duncan and Tyler James), are hip-hop powerhouses who have collaborated multiple times before joining forces as Sun Centauri. Under their individual stage names, they’ve released Fruit to the Knife in 2022 and After the Last Time in 2023. Sun Centauri debuted with “Two Shots,” a single released in August 2024 and began performing full sets as a duo soon after.
Just under a year in, Sun Centauri has gained a reputation for enveloping audiences in dreamy interstellar worlds during their live shows, particularly during festival appearances at Lost Woods and Mission Creek. Performing in NASA jumpsuits, incorporating visuals from space (actual astral projections, if you will), and the spacey ambiance of James’s instrumentation all deepen the group’s connection with the cosmos.
That extraterrestrial motif is prominent across Flux4D’s five tracks, and Duncan’s curiosity about aliens prompted the record’s aesthetic.
“I'm very visual, so I like to give him words and tell him about things that are inspiring me or things that are heavy on my mind. And at [the time we were writing the album], it was aliens in space,” Duncan said. “There's a lot of space stuff going on around the world and things happening in the skies.”
When asked if he believed in aliens, Duncan replied, “Yes. 103%. Absolutely.”
Cultivating an ethereal live soundscape as a mere duo does present challenges. Duncan has no problem delivering excellent live vocals, but James’s lush layers of production can be complicated to replicate on the spot. Fortunately, James continues to refine his blend of loops and live instrumentation to deliver an in-person transcendent ambiance.
“It's a work in progress, trying to figure out that mix between what’s tracked and what's live […], and sometimes I feel like I'm in no man’s land between both,” James said. “I feel like a lot of times, I'm writing over my head as a player. As a producer, I have infinite takes on eight bars. […] So then it's like, you write the song better than you can play [live]. How do you catch up? That challenge is really good for me as an artist.”
James and Duncan have found that as attention spans shrink, both for music consumers and the artists themselves, their approach to releasing music must adapt.
Both artists believe they can best channel their inspiration by releasing singles and EPs; opting to forgo traditional LPs, at least for now.
“I'm just a big fan of the EPs because when you work a job, as we both do, [...] five songs seem to take about a year.” James said. “In the attention economy that we all live in, I think you waste a lot of material. Even really big artists, I feel like their album comes out and people listen for a couple days, and that’s all that you get, so I think there's an advantage to spreading your stuff out. And five songs, to me, feels like a project.”
While the outer space themes are writ large, Sun Centauri is also an exploration into the minds of Duncan and James. Embodying the personas of Alyx Rush and Jim Swim offers them new artistic avenues for self-expression.
“If you're an emotional person, as I think both of us are, sometimes your emotions are bigger than your experience,” James said. “Sometimes, in stepping out of yourself and your narrative, you actually tap into more of the truth of your emotion than if you just, blow-by-blow, told the story of your relationship or this moment in your life. I feel like we lean towards the mood of the emotion over everything, over a theme or a concept or any lyric.”
The duo is already in the process of writing their next EP, fans can take flight with Sun Centauri at this year’s Alternating Currents festival in Davenport. They play the Made Indie Market on Saturday, August 16, at 1 p.m. and later at 8 p.m. at UP Skybar. Both performances are free.
