Trying to write about SOPHIE is proving extraordinarily difficult. We keep asking ourselves how SOPHIE, an artist with an objectively small body of work, was able to not only distill pop and electronic music down to their most carnal states, but straight up flip the traditional genre notions on their heads-- and how this one person came to redefine so much of pop culture’s trajectory.

KT Pipal:
When I heard about SOPHIE’s passing , I pulled up Spotify and ransacked my bookshelf for an essay I wanted to reread. The ideas in it feel adjacent to why I love SOPHIE -- a need for freedom in art, for a lawless and deeply personal newness. The idea that we can struggle with any art, struggle with any name, any body, and just release it instead of trying to make it fit. The essay is Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann.

...it took me years to consider the fact that I did not have to name my gender or sexuality at all, so that now I must always tell people that I am not something. I insist on this absence more, even, than I used to insist on my identities... The uninscribed, like Gonzalez-Torres says, is a site of change, where I might understand my actual context and do something about it, rather than getting tangled up in a game of words, and so that is where I would like to focus. I am of course still written into this whole structure, I can’t escape the language, but that won’t stop me from refusing it anyway, and believing that a blank paper might transport me somewhere else.

T Fleischmann, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, 2019

Guin Frehling:
I remember my first time ever listening to SOPHIE (99.9% sure it was the song ‘Lemonade’). I distinctly remember giggling aloud, “whoa.. what IS THISSS????” Something about the abrasive / obtuse nature of the sounds-- pitch-bent synths textured by impossible-to-place sonic artifacts (glass breaking? human.. yelps?)-- felt so fucked up, almost, dare I say..wrong? Sharp, freaky sounds colliding in blissful formation, orchestrated in the familiar context of a shiny pop banger… something about it felt entirely new, different, and exciting to me (which, not to sound like a total snob, isn’t something that happens to me very often with new music, particularly music that, categorically, would be played in the ‘club’). This felt totally different. This felt challenging, important. I immediately knew I wanted, no, needed more.

I was hooked, and I quickly started down a rabbit hole in search of more SOPHIE, the majority of which lead me to tracks put out by other artists that SOPHIE had a hand in producing, and many of which have since become some of my most-played songs over the past few years. (“Yeah Right” from Vince Staples Big Fish Theory was my top played track on Spotify for two years in a row (2017 + 2018), and Cashmere Cat’s “9 (After Coachella)” has comfortably found a place on multiple ‘top tracks’ roundups as well.)

As Holly Herndon said in an interview for her AI-accompanied album PROTO, “If you want to be a radical today you have to be dealing with the current climate and the current conditions and pushing things forward with all of the information we have access to... You can’t LARP the past… Music has a huge problem with that. That kind of regurgitation nostalgia.” Pop music is the space where this nostalgia can disappear, where nothing trends for long enough to be recalled meaningfully, where the future is always cusping and getting ripped off all at once. Where cryptic messages and difficult instrumentation come to die, where the beat is often as sparse as the lyrics are regurgitative.

This looked-down-upon genre, supposedly devoid of any meaning, is precisely what SOPHIE knew she could transform. The experience of SOPHIE’s work demands a presence and immediacy unrecognizable in most main-stream music. It’s found in the viscerality of the dance floor and in the weight of her sounds, which were so rarely sample-based, never recalling the familiar. “I think being completely authentic about the time you live in is something that I would view as a career-long objective — to find out what is authentically this moment.” Vulture

GF:
I always found it oddly hard to describe SOPHIE’s music, I usually just end up rattling off a list of nuance-laden juxtapositions, like a scatter plot of contradicting adjectives, that, when combined, somehow painted an appropriate picture of what I was attempting to describe. Kind of uncomfortable but also extremely satisfying. Fractured and disjointed yet perfectly calculated and harmonious. Mischievous, naughty even (?), yet hypnotizing and euphoric. Quintessentially pop-y yet somehow also quintessentially “anti-pop”? Avant-garde but also accessible, “out there” yet somehow right at home in the mainstream. KT recently informed me that one critic described SOPHIE’s music as “wet plastic”, which I really liked.

The best of SOPHIE, compiled by Hii

You can immediately recognize any track that SOPHIE touched by its scathing, pleasure-soaked pop glisten, slithering and wet but crystalline and thick. It’s almost as if it was, as we’d say, sound-designed, rather than composed. Listening to SOPHIE’s music feels akin to walking through a haunted house; you move along with a heightened sense of awareness not knowing what might await you around any given corner but fully understanding that at any point something very well could jump out and surprise (and/or startle) you.

It’s tempting to question the authenticity of people who love “popular” music. Record label execs and pop producers are notoriously slimy characters. Hell, we laugh at ourselves for how much we love the top 40. Where’s the sincerity, the originality, the authenticity? But those same stereotypical incriminations become hazy in the context of SOPHIE, and certainly not by accident. SOPHIE deliberately embraced the mainstream. “An experimental idea doesn’t have to be separated from a mainstream context,” she once said. “The really exciting thing is where those two things are together. That’s where you can get real change.”

By Guin Frehling + KT Pipal