On Saturday, forward thinking pop and music producer Sophie died after an accident in Athens. She was 34 years old. “True to her spirituality,” wrote her family in a statement, “she went up to see the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell.” The story was both tragic and beautiful, full of pain, shock and, underneath it, an almost supernatural desire. It was like a Sophie song.
Sophie may not have been a household name, but over the course of her short career she has had a profound and transformative effect on the way modern pop music sounds. Since emerging with her frenetic single “Bipp” in 2013, the Scottish production company, who lived in Los Angeles, has started to work with artists like Madonna, Vince Staples and Charli XCX. As a solo artist, Sophie’s pioneering music was perhaps ready for a bigger crossover; his 2018 album, “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides”, was nominated for a Grammy for best dance / electronic album. Its influence can be heard both in the instant gratification of the 100-gec hyper-pop and in the energetic hooks of the K-pop boom.
Sophie’s production overflowed with ideas. Where others perceived shallow surfaces, she saw ocean depths – in the musicality of hyperfeminized speech, in the increased honesty of artifice, in the plastic materials found in the consumer culture of late capitalism. She had an attentive and crooked ear for the overlap between the language of desire and the language of modern advertising, and her songs sometimes sounded like commercial jingles from other planets: “If you need it, but don’t know what it is, shake it up it, shake it and make it bubble, ”said the infectious“ Vyzee ”, ad infinitum.
When she first arrived, shrouded in anonymity within the male-dominated world of electronic music, people wondered about Sophie’s genre. In late 2017, she announced, through interviews and the open-hearted synthesizer ballad “It’s Okay to Cry”, that she was a trans woman. Her first singles were revealed in the fluidity of femininity and masculinity, as well as in the softness and hardness, and suddenly it seemed that the aesthetic with which she played in her music was related to the private process of becoming herself. There was beauty in it, and a tangible release when she stepped into the spotlight.
“For me, transness is taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit, so that the two do not fight against each other and struggle to survive,” she said in an interview with Paper magazine at the time. “In this land, it is that you can get closer to how you feel it is your true essence, without the social pressures of having to fulfill certain traditional gender-based roles. This means that you are not a mother or father – you are an individual who is looking at the world and feeling the world. “
From his solo material and production work to other artists, here are some of his essential tracks.
In June 2013, on the Scottish electronic label Numbers, “Bipp” came out of nowhere – from an emptiness as empty and alive with possibilities as the white background of its cover. The track looked as much like a club banger as a laboratory experiment by a mad scientist. Hyper-processed percussion and cheerleader vocals sang to each other as if they were both made of Flubber. “I can make you feel better, if you allow me,” intoned a restless and agitated vocal, inviting the listener to succumb to the song’s strange promise of ecstasy.
‘Lemonade’ (2014)
A year later, Sophie released a track as explosively effervescent as a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos cocktail. “Lemonade” increased the most polarizing aspects of its aesthetics: the surface brightness was even more synthetic, the vocals even higher and the rhythm – ranging from a trapping cadence to an accelerated pop hook – was as erratic as it was exciting.
‘Difficult’ (2014)
Electronic music sometimes has a reputation for being serious, but many of Sophie’s songs popped with strange humor. “Difficult”, the kinetic side B of “Lemonade”, was among them. It was both a furtive and vividly tactile ode to BDSM – “latex gloves, slap it hard” – and an astute joke about gender binary, like an ultrafemme helium voice intones: “Hard, hard, I understand so hard . “
QT, ‘Hey QT’ (2014)
In 2014, Sophie had become closely associated with PC Music, a bustling collective of musicians and electronic producers based in Britain that mixes the cutting edge brainpower with the serious and massive catharsis of the pop music product. QT was a short-lived project that brought Sophie together with the leading figure of PC Music and producer AG Cook, along with Hayden Frances Dunham, who was “playing” a pop star named QT who was also a spokesman for an energy elixir invented called DrinkQT.
Music is a joyous sugar wave, but some skeptics have wondered whether Sophie and Cook were becoming too mired in ideas and irony, and in the process alienating potential listeners. Sophie confused her critics even more when “Lemonade” was used in a 2015 web commercial for … McDonald’s Lemonade. “People were furious,” Sophie recalled in an interview with Vulture a few years later. “But I don’t think it compromises anything in music.” She added: “If you can do two things with it, make it meaningful to you from the perspectives you want to share and also make it work in the mass market and therefore expose your message to more people in a less context. elitist, so this is the ideal place to be. ”
‘Just Like We Never Said Goodbye’ (2015)
When she gave her 2015 singles collection the sassy Warholian title “Product”, Sophie was once again blinking into the perceived chasm between art and consumer culture. But her final track – the painful, sparkling, heartbreaking heartbreaker of the pop millennium “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye” – was a preview of what would come from her later solo material, and proof that, however much she gave herself up to ideas, she was also a magician specializing in big, heartfelt emotions.
Madonna with Nicki Minaj, ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’ (2015)
In 2015, Sophie’s innovative sound had reached so far into the mainstream that even Material Girl wanted a song. “Bitch I’m Madonna”, the pleasantly bold single from superstar pop’s 13th studio album, “Rebel Heart”, remains perhaps the most profiled track on which Sophie worked. Although she shared the credit for writing with half a dozen other collaborators, and although the chorus’ drop-by-drop structure is Diplo with an audible time stamp of the years 2010, the verses with plastic effect, bouncing pre-chorus and self-referentiality lively bring Sophie’s distinctive marks.
Charli XCX, ‘Vroom Vroom’ (2016)
Charli XCX proved to be an even more likable collaborator and muse of pop. She and Sophie worked together on a handful of unique and animated tracks – “No Angel”, “Girls Night Out” – as well as throughout Charli’s 2016 experimental EP “Vroom Vroom”. This elegant and kinetic title track is built as a personalized tour for Charli’s distinct musical personality.
Vince Staples with Kendrick Lamar, ‘Yeah Right’ (2017)
Although Sophie worked more often with pop artists than rappers, she produced two tracks on 2017’s sonically adventurous MC Vince Staples album “Big Fish Theory”, including “Yeah Right” (which also featured contributions from the Australian DJ and producer) Flume). After Kendrick Lamar sent his guest verse, Sophie told Paper Magazine, “We edited the vocals and tried to overproduce the song. They wanted a little more raw, but they left it anyway and people liked it. Vince was playing the whole time. “
‘It’s okay to cry’ (2017)
Sophie’s first moving single from “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” was a kind of debutante party. Stepping out of the hazy shadows of her early work, Sophie put herself and her red hair like a carrot at the center of the project – singing the main vocal and starring in the music video, which managed to be both vulnerable and vampire at the same time. “I hope you don’t misinterpret,” she sang over a sparkling synthesizer arpeggio, “but I think your interior is your best side.”
‘Faceshopping’ (2018)
Like the exciting “Ponyboy”, “Faceshopping” was an “Oil” version – a version of the more industrial and heavy side of Sophie’s sound. The intoned and expressionless vocals of the music are like a return of “Lemonade”, but here the language of consumption and advertising is mixed even more subversively with reflections on identity and self-creation: “My face is in front of the store”, she announces, “I am real when I buy my face.” In Vulture, Sophie mused: “This is a recurring theme in this song – questioning prejudices about what is real and authentic. What is natural, what is not natural and what is artificial, in terms of music, in terms of genre, in terms of reality, I suppose. “
‘Immaterial’ (2018)
A deliriously catchy and catchy nod from Madonna (“immaterial girls, immaterial boys”) that works as a meditation on the connection between body and soul – what could be more essentially Sophie than that?
‘Bipp (Autechre Remix)’ (2021)
In 2015, Sophie established a personal creed about remixes of her work: she wanted none, “unless it’s Autechre”. Five years later, the British electronic duo sent back their version of “Bipp” with the note: “Sorry for the delay. I hope it’s still useful. ”A few days before Sophie’s death, it was released with an unpublished B side of her,” Unisil “. Slow and sparse, the remix is a loving tribute to two of her musical heroes, and proof that even Sophie’s early works still sound like the future.