A wake for the forward-thinking pop producer, featuring family, friends, collaborators, and followers.
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This article was originally published on March 12, 2021, following SOPHIEs death.
Her self-titled posthumous album was released on September 25, 2024.
Journalist Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard best summed it up in a tweet: the past tense doesnt suit SOPHIE.
SOPHIE pushed that process alongby collaborating with everyonefrom Madonna to Vince Staples to Arca.
As much as SOPHIE was known for solo work, collaboration energized the producer.
So, SOPHIEs decision to then turn inward created a breakthrough moment.
I could be anything I want, vocalist Cecile Believe sings on Immaterial, the victorious penultimate song.
On March 5, Unsound Productions released SOPHIEs first posthumous track, the amorphous Jlin collaboration JSLOIPNHIE.
SOPHIE might not be around for the future, but it wont be a future without SOPHIE.
She was inspired by and tried to emulate the electronic music that we always loved so much.
Success wasnt something that came to SOPHIE overnight.
Calum Morton (co-founder of Numbers; released SOPHIEsPRODUCTsingles):We started talking in early 2012.
Everyone wanted to try so hard to pigeonhole stuff into these really defined lanes.
When SOPHIE sent us BIPP, it was just so refreshing.
It was taking in what we felt like was that freedom of disco and freestyle music from New York.
Some people wanted to grip onto formats, for authenticity.
But this whole project was dealing in ideas more than any medium.
The vinyl itself took six months to sell.
But it was just not about that, at all.
To me, this was SOPHIE creating SOPHIE.
Forming a whole new thing around sounds and ideas.
The idea of genre was already old for SOPHIE.
And it certainly evolves in crazier ways as the story goes on.
Theres not that many people who released that breadth of musical styles in such unique and refreshing ways.
I remember listening like,What the fuck is this music?
This is insane, because it was.
It was just something I never heard before.
Im a firm believer that the best shit is just the simplest stuff.
it’s possible for you to trace that all to literally just BIPP.
Like, a lot of the people who were really, really into that early SOPHIE music were queer.
That divide felt very clear to me in the beginning.
Everyone had assumed certain things about SOPHIE because SOPHIE was really good at synthesis.
as an icebreaker was just everywhere.
That was the ideal scenario, I think, for Soph.
And we would laugh about that a little bit too, after the fact.
I still dont think there has been another kind of disruptive moment like that since.
But hearing those very industrial and harsh sounds for the first time was such an elating feeling.
It just really pushed boundaries in brutality.
I was absolutely awestruck by everything I was hearing.
It was like nothing I had ever heard before.
I became so obsessed so fast in a way that I hadnt been with an artist before.
I just couldnt get enough of it.
The music was so hard, but it was so unique and different.
I started trying to make little beats myself, like on GarageBand.
Obviously those didnt really turn out very good.
But I was so inspired to create upon listening to it.
Finding out about SOPHIE really started my entire musical journey.
But I loved it.
I tried to smuggle a can of [DrinkQT] back home and I think TSA took it.
I was so pissed.
Just a sound design that Id never heard.
I mean, when I first heardPC Music,I was already very taken with that.
It almost brings up a discomfort alongside a euphoric release.
She should be in the textbooks.
She really influenced where pop music has gone.
It was a really special moment.
You could see it in Charli too.
You could tell that she feels something about it, everyone else feels something about it.
It was a real moment of joy playing those songs.
Shamir:SOPHIE and QT were on the lineup for Laneway Festival [in 2016].
So everyone finds their circle of friends.
We got really close really fast.
This SOPHIE news really sucks… aside from being a literal genius she was just a genuinely caring person.
Rest easy my love pic.twitter.com/HpLEl11cE9
The more I think about her, the less its about the music.
Aside from who she was as an artist, she was just a good person.
And you might ask anyone in the music industry, that is hard to come by.
I can count on one hand how many people who are as nice as they are talented.
There would always be something new.
It wasnt like when youre used to going to these shows and youre just hearing the old catalog.
All of a sudden, youre like,Wait, the other stuff was blowing my mind.
It would never be the same thing twice.
That was SOPHIE, and she wouldnt have had it any other way.
Its still the sickest show I have gone to.
It feels like youre there.
She was one artist that I actually would listen to live unreleased songs of from SoundCloud.
I would listen to the live rip of Kitty Cat in the gym every single day.
[SOPHIE] is so quiet, but yet has such a huge presence just on a personal level.
It was like everyone knew.
I remember her saying, You carry the torch for the trans girls.
And I was like, No, shut up.
You do, bitch.
Wed go into late night text sessions of like, Youre changing the world, you are so amazing.
It felt like there was a real connection with us both being transgender and just similarities in our experiences.
I shared an appreciation for SOPHIEs music with a lot of other queer and trans people.
That video is very vulnerable.
Theres this period of figuring out,What do I look like now?
How do I feel about this?
How is this real?
But we would always have fun going through iterations.
I have books worth of emails.
Half of the feedback notes, were talking about plastic and latex and construction terminology.
We would talk about slides and use the slides as visual guides to how the audio would sound.
And they were like secrets.
One message I looked up from my email reads, Hey, Ive got the feedback.
Im working on the underwater section, whilst Im away …
Trying to get these sliding-down-a-straw sounds at the moment.
That just gives you an idea of the language.
Banoffee:I actually cried the first time I came out of a session with Soph.
SOPHIE was very quick in the studio she gets things done in like ten minutes.
Jimmy Edgar (collaborator on METAL):We were immediately best friends.
I was struck by her energy and aura, theres something enigmatic about it.
She was always authentic and sharp with words.
I loved to write ideas and lyrics with her.
Thats where we flowed the most.
We would peruse the magazine shops to get ideas from the headlines and covers.
We had written some songs in minutes and would take turns playing with vocal phrases on the microphone.
SOPHIE was a gentle and innocent soul, someone I look up to every day.
Very sensitive, hyperdetailed, and incredibly visual.
Petras:It was cool to work with someone who never questioned what they did.
We would just make song after song after song in SOPHIEs world.
It was really like friends hanging out, making music, and connecting over being nerds for music.
I think we made like 10 or 12 songs together in those two days that we worked together.
It was that easy.
We all were dancing around the studio to it and so excited about it.
It has real fun in it.
It might be fucking chainsaws and robot sex, but I dont give a fuck.
The work was more about finding those connective seams between like-minded artists and working with others.
That Quay Dash song, Queen of This Shit that beat doesnt sound like anything else that SOPHIE did.
I hear this communion between the way Quay Dash raps and the way those squeaky balloons rubbing together sound.
And my references were all like textures and objects and, you know, kids toys.
Some producers would just be like, Get out!
She was so proud of it, and that made me proud of it.
Every nut and bolt and screw is made to fit in that spot.
And I was really blown away by that.
I was still rooted in industrial sounds, which had been my zone for most of my life.
SOPHIE incorporated a lot of those, too, but they were so bright and colorful.
Its like a whole new sound.
And I was never that good at sound design its a bit too much like math for me.
With SOPHIEs music, its impossible to tell whats what.
I always assume that SOPHIEs stuff is entirely synthesized.
Maybe that is a romantic sense of, thats cooler to me.
But it just blurs that line between the two worlds, to the point where it doesnt really matter.
Im very lucky to have been able to meet her.
Banoffee:I want to stress that everyone who knew SOPHIE had such a different experience with her.
If she let you in, she trusted you with everything in her.
I feel like, sometimes, people just wanted to see her as this symbol instead of a person.
We talked about Arca at one point.
Its like, Okay, this is the structure?
Oh, surely theres something more interesting.
Nothing needed to be added, nothing needed to be taken away.
Im not a control freak in collaborations, and I didnt have to [be] with SOPHIE.
The track is good, but its not as exciting with her not being here.
We lost a beautiful artist early; she was nowhere near done.
But, legends never die.
Her spirit is definitely still here, we just all wish she was here physically.
Cause she had a lot of work left to do.
Morton:Of course, theamount of peoplewanting a piece of SOPHIEs originality was almost exhausting.
But thats just the sign of an incredible artistic force.
So, to try and fight it, its fruitless.
SOPHIE somehow covered almost every genre imaginable.
But each was done uniquely because SOPHIE was happy to make something new and synthesize it into SOPHIEs world.
And creating a new future as part of that.
Even this idea of progression was there across everything from SOPHIE.
Theres always the crazy stuff that people are yet to hear.
My favorite SOPHIE song is always the next song, if Im honest.
Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
