SOPHIE
SOPHIE veiled by a gaseous form, in one of two promotional images that include the artist, augmented for the album campaign. Shot and edited courtesy of Renata Raksha. Made available via Rolling Stone.
On the fateful morning of January 31, 2021, it became unforeseeably apparent that the world of electronic music had awoken anew, never to be the same again. Outpourings of love and support came in the guise of tributes from the most alternative and mainstream voices in the industry alike—an ode to the trailblazing producer pioneer’s profile—as the masses caught up with what had come to pass in the days prior from SOPHIE’s closest collaborators.
Met with encumbering shock and disbelief, a tragic accident had befallen the superstar in Athens, Greece, under the advent of the year’s first full moon. Many fans balked at the freak nature of the occurrence, that something so rare and singular could ever happen to a presence so transcendental as SOPHIE’s, who operated both within the particulate confines of the physical (as on the digitally rendered water-slide droplet covers that comprised debut compilation PRODUCT; existing in artifice in service of a characteristically blithe and childlike human experience—like the songs themselves) and beyond, revealing her likeness just four years prior with the launch of the ethereal ‘It’s Okay to Cry’ music video (the first taste of her then upcoming, since acclaimed inaugural Grammy-nominated studio album, 2018’s ‘OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES’).
SOPHIE: The Voice Behind Louis Vuitton S/S20, "It's Ok To Cry" brought a captivating audiovisual experience to the Paris Fashion Week finale, shared via British Vogue and courtesy of photographer Pascal Le Segretain.
To the backdrop of cloud cover, the latter set a precedent for SOPHIE’s artisanal otherworldliness, skirting experimentation and pop sensibilities in a more loosely defined avant-garde form. As an aesthetic expression of the sort of blue-sky ideation that occupies the auras she summons in song, the artist proudly espoused her trans identity, basking in the weather-stricken highs of a crystal-clear nebula, marking the occasion of her newfound visibility as celestially significant. For someone who thus eventually became so present in image—since fronting raves, editorial shoots, and magazine covers—yet remained so aloof, content with an offline existence, her absence only left despondence in its path, as well as a whole universe of ardent adoration that will perhaps forever be in collective mourning.
This is where ‘SOPHIE’ comes in, the self-titled sophomore release from the producer pioneer’s estate: a sprawling sixteen-track body of work, wearing her moniker not as elegy, but in memoriam of her continued life in another plane, reverberating at a higher frequency. For, as much as elusiveness became synonymous with the SOPHIE brand, first capturing the attention of music press back in 2013 with the release of the double single ‘Nothing More To Say / Eeehhh’(emblazoned in faceless fluid typography, minimalist in layers of production—yet divisively punchy in their sound), the capacity SOPHIE would garner for idolization largely stemmed from the limited repertoire of output officially released, initially on Huntleys + Palmers, before migrating to the Numbers label, and eventually finding a home at Transgressive.
The posthumous LP ‘SOPHIE’ falls on their Future Classic imprint (emblematically a fitting oxymoron as SOPHIE’s discography is often described as such; the word “classic” implying revered legacy, its qualifier “future” curtailing its footing in dialogues of the past, forward-looking in both sonics and ethos), and is unmistakably the first and last of its kind. It’s the most—and only—fully formed work that the artist left behind (her planned “pop album”), with material dating all the way back to 2015 and the PRODUCT era, insofar as the peak of the COVID pandemic in 2020, prior to SOPHIE’s passing.
At the time, few knew what would happen to SOPHIE’s dense unpublished catalogue, nor did they want to—and we certainly weren’t owed it; the electronicist had been highly generative in the most formative years of her career, to the knowledge of many, and her annoyance, plagued by persistent leaks. Ever the forthright, adamant perfectionist, stretching, augmenting, and distorting stems for maximum hard-hitting velocity (replaying them up to ten thousand times over, as recalled anecdotally by sister Emily Long), there is no telling then whether the tracklist of ‘SOPHIE’ as it stands would have undergone further alteration had it been an occasion where SOPHIE had full say, whittling down its length, extending it, or even scrapping it completely (we already knew that the producer had also been set to put out a more experimental project which was done away with; if tacked on here, the run of tracks that fans proclaim wanting would been more destructive than the positivist belief system I believe this album inhabits, at odds with SOPHIE’s message as much as her wishes).
There is no use in engaging in speculation on the potential of what could have been either, when we have it—and what it is we are lucky to have, which is by no means a hastily produced cashgrab, but rather lovingly put together, SOPHIE done right by those who know her spirit best. That is, ‘SOPHIE’ has painstakingly been a family affair, enlisting the efforts of siblings Ben (who had long been involved in engineering SOPHIE’s work and conversations about its posterity) and Emily Long (who was set to study music law in the hopes of working with SOPHIE in the future back at the end of 2020) to apply finishing touches. Although the songs in their previous state had been at varying degrees of finality, the two assert that this is what SOPHIE would want: the album out rather than none, regardless of a helping hand, which really speaks to the generosity of her character (who, after all, had distributed a sample pack of entire sounds she had constructed, commercially free for public use).
Now, with the intergalactic sediment mostly having settled over the discourse of its September 25 release, ‘SOPHIE’ itself is actually naturally sectioned into four quadrants, tracing all aspects of the documented SOPHIE sound. At times, it is hard to believe that the album was arranged by the artist as such, distilling all her facets into one celebratory, eclectic experience. However, to those who kept in the know, her last project (the masterful ‘OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES NON-STOP REMIX ALBUM’) hinted at such a progression, re-envisioning that album across techno, ambient, and house genres, somehow seamlessly transitioned—another testament to SOPHIE’s brilliance.
Very much a continuation of the liminal precedent that was set by the remix undertaking (think ‘Cold Water’), ‘Intro (The Full Horror)’ instills the tone for the first act: atmospheric, formless, and gestational. As the album’s opener and only solo track, SOPHIE acquaints the listener with a mood that is aimless but exacting, highly reminiscent of the sort of work Angelo Badalamenti was doing on the ‘Twin Peaks’ score when the notion of dark ambient was in its infancy. Paired with Russian DJ Nina Kraviz’s choice words that monologue ‘The Dome’s Protection’, these symphonically synth-driven pieces elucidate a raw cosmic energy, populating the album with the immediacy of vacant space—paving the perfect way for the perfect existential introduction to the rave.
The other component tracks of this portion are unfocused in other senses; their instrumentation feels less afloat, meditative, and inward-looking in the face of the outward, and more haphazardly driving, abrupt, and urgent by intent. On ‘Rawwwwww’, Jozzy’s autotuned drawl meanders parenthetical to the textured sprongs of the beat, which feels muted in comparison to other hip-hop tracks that SOPHIE had a hand in (like ‘Yeah Right’ and ‘SAMO’ by Vince Staples, and ‘Queen of this S**t’ by Quay Dash). As a demonstration of SOPHIE’s dexterity at signal synthesis on the Monomachine, however, the track presents an interesting acoustic exercise for the listener to parse, in how she would disassemble, inflate, and construct proxies for real world and imagined sounds, coalescing them into a discordant vision, as also heard in the sawingly sparse modulation of ‘Plunging Asymptote’ (previously released with multidisciplinary artist Juliana Huxtable under the name Analemma on a Kraviz compilation, ‘locus error’).
While those compositions abridge the algorithmic quotient of ‘SOPHIE’, imparting the listener with a firmly esoteric manifesto for relinquishing the real and embracing obscurity, the trifecta of the fan favorite ‘Reason Why’, ‘Live in My Truth’, and ‘Why Lies’ funnel all the effervescent, bubblegum tangibility of letting oneself go in dealing with the brunt of very real, distinctly earthen problems. Collaborating with duo BC Kingdom, they carry affirmative upbeat truths (“You got to love who you are” / “You make me wanna live in my truth” / “I don’t want no trauma comin’ at me”) strung out over genius earworm melodies, bass-assisted to pop bliss, with vocals from Kim Petras and LIZ pitched-up and percussive to perfection. Songs that revel in such euphoria at one time or another would be derided for being facetious—the average rockist perpetuating the notion that poptimism speaks to none in the generalities of self-reclamation, release, and joy—but SOPHIE’s intellect clearly wasn’t guilty of such ignorance: it is ever transparent that she held a deep reverence for music past here as much as she spoke of carving an idealistic vision of its future (thus bringing tomorrow to us, irrefutably married in the present).
Nonetheless, going from a spoken-word guided odyssey through computation as the fulcrum of reality to the sugary coat of protection that an authentic existence offers is a remarkably jarring switch-up. Yet, by now, the listener probably understands at least one fundamental truth about SOPHIE: that she swerved convention. I believe she recognized that there is no linearity to human emotion, nor its manifestation, and that this bled into the ethos of her infinite palette. You can get to the specificity of a feeling parsimoniously, transmitting a lot with the nonverbal in different ways, and SOPHIE accordingly tinkered with the minutiae of all the smallest and biggest sounds at her disposal. Well-acquainted pop tropes speak to the soul as much as IDM does (arguably even more), as the Pet Shop Boys were to Autechre in her own taste (once proclaiming no remixes, only Autechre, of which was accomplished by 2021’s ‘BIPP - Autechre Mx’). Thus, by melding genres, overblown and minimal, SOPHIE’s vision is singularly amorphous.
The next phase of the album rings true to this, notching up the BPM, trading out live in-the-moment orchestration for what can only be described as an impromptu nonstop DJ set. This is the zenith that past tracks spoke of, no longer alluding to the dance floor in harmony but firmly diverting the listener to it via delightfully pulsating dissonance. The bulk of these tracks (‘Do You Wanna Be Alive?’, ‘Elegance’, ‘Berlin Nightmare’, ‘Gallop’, and ‘One More Time’) previously debuted at various live raves from 2019 and 2020 (Unsound, the Grimes-backed Biohaque, and Boiler Room) in other iterations—and are now finally here in all their austere, repetitive glory as collaborations with SOPHIE’s love Evita Manji, the elusive Popstar, and BIG SISTER. Together, they feel like one piece, hard to tell exactly where one ends and the other begins by lack of fade-out or cutoff. Despite the chopped and looped nature of the vocals, their production progresses while they bleed into one another, charting a faculty for transformation overall.
Lyrically, this sort of rampant quixotism is achieved on the album’s poignant final four-part sonata. ‘Exhilarate’ is an accessible power-pop moment steered by Bibi Bourelly (of Rihanna’s ‘B**h Better Have My Money’* pen), uplifting oneself not to succumb to the allure of overdrive, but rather to scale back in the moment, however fleeting time is—to the inorganic squelches that equally propel the song, intermittently punctuating its runtime. These sorts of sounds also proliferate the twinkly synth-backed ‘Always and Forever’, a full-circle collaboration with PC Music’s Hannah Diamond. High-brow in concept, low-key and airy in feel, “For always and forever / Forever and for always we’ll be shining together / And as the years go by you’ll still be by my side,” the song is a touching tribute to their friendship, lamentably made on the final day the pair saw one another.
The other promotional image; SOPHIE next to liquid matter–something she would probably try to emulate in sound, out of endless curiosity. Shot and edited by Renata Raksha. Circulated via the official @msmsmsm_forever IG account.
Ultimately, ‘My Forever’ and ‘Love Me Off Earth’ also emit an uncanny feeling with the way of their release into the world, duly bookending ‘SOPHIE’. The former is SOPHIE doing ballad, glossy and 80s in sound–the clear highlight of the project–unified with the operatic overtones of Cecile Believe (time and again, SOPHIE’s go-to vocalist and collaborator; SOPHIE was naturally averse to hierarchies, collaboration evidently much a part of her creative instinct and holistic expression). “Everybody’s got to own their body” becomes “Everybody’s got to own their story” as ‘My Forever’ unfolds, which talks about not being sequestered by the distance of place nor memory, but living in vicarious presence, breaking beyond corporeal vessels–enmeshed in the narrative of astral extension.
We may never remedy the malaise of SOPHIE’s loss in our hearts nor the culture, but as this final section attests, immaterial eternity trumps short-lived temporality. To the rhetorical question prompted by New York’s Doss on ‘Love Me Off Earth’, “What is it worth to love me on Earth?”, SOPHIE’s unending imagination provides an answer: “Defying logic and time / Love me off Earth”. Devoid from the album’s marketing, you conjure her image in the laser-like, gooey fluid substance of the sound on ‘SOPHIE’, which breaks down in this song as it switches key to a purgative pace. Thankfully made material by those who knew her best, SOPHIE’s artistry is decidedly interminable; she lives on through the music, with or without it.
