Listen to Sophie’s 12 Essential Songs

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On Saturday, avant-garde pop producer and musician Sophie died in an accident in Athens. She was 34 years old. “True to her spirituality,” her family wrote in a statement, “she had come up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell. The story was both tragic and beautiful, full of pain, shock and underneath everything an almost otherworldly 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 releasing her frenzied single “Bipp” in 2013, the Scottish, Los Angeles-based producer has continued to work with artists including Madonna, Vince Staples and Charli XCX. As a solo artist, Sophie’s pioneering music was perhaps ready for a bigger crossover; her 2018 album “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” was nominated for Best Dance / Electronic Grammy Album. His influence can be heard both in the instant gratification of the 100 guy hyperpop and in the energetic hooks of the K-pop boom.

Sophie’s production is full of ideas. Where others perceived shallow surfaces, she saw ocean depths – in the musicality of hyper-feminized speech, in the heightened honesty of artifice, in the plastic materials found in the consumer culture of capitalism. late. She had a keen and ironic 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 something but don’t know what that it is, shake it shake it and make it sparkle, ”says the contagious“ Vyzee ”, ad infinitum.

When she first arrived shrouded in anonymity in the male dominated world of electronic music, people wondered about Sophie’s gender. At the end of 2017, she announced, via interviews and the open-hearted synth ballad “It’s Okay to Cry”, that she was a transgender woman. Her early singles reveled in the fluidity of femininity and masculinity, as well as the sweetness and harshness, and suddenly it seemed like the aesthetic she had performed in her music was tied to the private process of become herself. There was beauty in there, and a palpable release when she stepped into the limelight.

“For me, transness takes control to bring your body more in tune with your soul and your spirit so that the two don’t fight against each other and struggle to survive,” she said. stated in an interview with Paper magazine around this time. “On this earth is that you can get closer to how you feel your true essence is without the societal pressures of having to fill some traditional gender-based roles. It means that you are neither a mother nor a father – you are a person who looks at the world and feels the world.

From his solo material and his production work for other artists, here are some of his essential pieces.

In June 2013, on Scottish electronic label Numbers, “Bipp” came out of nowhere – from a void as empty and alive with possibility as the white background of its sleeve. The track sounded as much like a club banger as it did a mad scientist’s lab experiment. The hyper-processed percussion and cheerleader vocals were heard as if they were both made from Flubber. “I can make you feel better, if you’ll let me,” a choppy, high-pitched voice sang, urging the listener to succumb to the song’s strange promise of ecstasy.

A year later, Sophie released a song as explosive and sparkling as a Diet-Coke-and-Mentos cocktail. “Lemonade” composed the most polarizing aspects of its aesthetic: the surface luster was even more synthetic, the vocals even higher, and the rhythm – which shifted from a trap cadence to an accelerated pop hook – was as erratic as it was. it was exhilarating.

Electronic music sometimes has a reputation for being serious, but a lot of Sophie’s songs cracked with bizarre humor. “Hard”, the kinetic B-side of “Lemonade”, was one of them. It was both a slinky and vividly tactile ode to BDSM – “latex gloves, slam so hard” – and a sneaky joke about binary sex, as an ultra-female, helium-like voice sings : “Hard, hard, I get very hard.”

By 2014, Sophie had become closely associated with PC Music, a noisy UK-based collective of musicians and electronic producers that blends the cerebral arch of the avant-garde with the serious mass catharsis of the pop music product. QT was a short-lived project that reunited Sophie with PC Music figurehead and producer AG Cook, as well as Hayden Frances Dunham, who ‘played’ a pop star named QT who was also the spokesperson for an energy elixir. invented called DrinkQT.

The song is a jubilant sugar rush, but some skeptics have questioned whether Sophie and Cook were getting too bogged down 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 ad for… McDonald’s lemonade. “People were pissed off,” Sophie recalls in an interview with Vulture a few years later. “But I don’t think that compromises anything in the music.” She added, “If you can do two things with it, make it meaningful to yourself based on the perspectives you want to share and also make it work in the mass market, and thus get your message out to more people.” in a less elitist setting then this is a great place to be.

When she gave her 2015 collection of singles the cheeky, Warholian title of “Product,” Sophie was once again winking at the perceived gulf between art and consumer culture. But her latest track – the heartbreaking, scintillating, millennial pop heartbreaker “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye” – was a preview of what was to come from her subsequent solo album, and proof that while she indulged in ideas, she was also an expert in conjuring great and sincere emotions.

By 2015, Sophie’s innovative sound had spread so much into the mainstream that even the Material Girl herself wanted a track. “Bitch I’m Madonna,” the pleasantly brash single from pop superstar’s 13th studio album, “Rebel Heart,” remains perhaps the most prominent track Sophie has worked on. Although she has shared writing credit with half a dozen other collaborators, and although the here’s-the-drop structure of the choir is audibly time-stamped 2010s Diplo, the plastic verses, the bouncing pre-chorus and dynamic self-referentiality bear the distinct marks of Sophie.

Charli XCX has proven to be an even more simpatico collaborator and pop muse. She and Sophie have worked together on a handful of unique and sparkling tracks – “No Angel”, “Girls Night Out” – as well as Charli’s entire 2016 experimental EP “Vroom Vroom”. This sleek, kinetic title track is built as a custom ride for Charli’s distinct musical personality.

Although Sophie worked more frequently with pop artists than with rappers, she produced two tracks on adventurous Compton MC Vince Staples’ 2017 album ‘Big Fish Theory’, including ‘Yeah Right’ (which featured also contributions from Australian DJ and producer Flume). After Kendrick Lamar sent in his guest verse, Sophie told Paper Magazine, “We edited the vocals and tried to overproduce the song. They wanted it to be a little more raw, but they still left it and people liked it. Vince played it all the time.

Sophie’s poignant first single from “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” was kind of a coming-out night. Stepping out of the hazy shadows of her early work, Sophie put herself and her carrot red hair shock at the center of the project – singing the lead vocals and playing in the music video for the song, which managed to be both vulnerable and vampy. time. “Hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” she sang over a sparkling synth arpeggio, “but I think your interior is your best side.

Like the enthralling “Ponyboy”, “Faceshopping” was an “Oil” version of the harder, more industrial side of Sophie’s sound. The song’s singing and impassive voice is in a way a reminder of “Lemonade”, but here the language of consumption and advertising is even more subversively mixed with reflections on identity and self-creation: “My face is the showcase, ”she announces,“ I’m real when I shop my face. ” In Vulture, Sophie said, “It’s a common theme in this music – challenging preconceptions about what’s real and genuine. What’s natural and what’s unnatural and what’s artificial, in terms of music, in terms of genre, in terms of reality, I guess.

A deliciously catchy and knowledgeable nod from Madonna (“intangible girls, intangible boys”) that is coupled with a meditation on the link between body and soul – what could be more typically Sophie than that?

In 2015, Sophie established a personal credo on remixes of her work: she didn’t want them, “unless it was Autechre”. Five years later, the British electronic duo fired their version of “Bipp” with the note “Sorry, it’s so late. Hope this is still useful. Just days before Sophie died, he came out with his own brand new B-side, “Unisil”. Slow and sparse, the remix is ​​a loving tribute to two of her musical heroes, and proof that even Sophie’s first work still sounds like the future.

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