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On January 30, 2021, SOPHIEdied in an accidentat age 34.
We are republishing our 2017 profile in the artists honor.
But theres something about the image of Sophie, vaping, that clicks.
Its made from software, but it ripples through your body all the same.
Studio sessions move fast, and often they take her places she wouldnt have discovered on her own.
That is such an exciting thing.
That gives me a lot of energy and pleasure and satisfaction.
When you collaborate with someone, you have to go very deep very quickly.
You have to get there very quickly.
Its an amazing experience.
I get a lot from that.
That was the extent of her public biography.
In October, a week before her RBMA show was scheduled to take place, Sophie manifested.
What else are you going to do for a first video?
she says, smiling.
she asks unprompted, and I am, but I tell her she should go for it.
Ive always wanted to do a music video, she says.
The pop-music video is one of the most powerful communication tools we have.
Anything she could say shes already recorded.
Sophie moved to Los Angeles from London about two years ago.
Its a bit like … whats that TV series?Westworld?
I think of [L.A.] like that because its too perfect to be true, she says.
I think you feel more liberated in a foreign country.
People were furious, she says.
But I dont think that compromises anything in the music.
If its used in that context, it doesnt change my intention of making it.
An experimental idea doesnt have to be separated from a mainstream context.
The really exciting thing is where those two things are together.
Thats where you’ve got the option to get real change.
Thats not my intention.
Now, she has broader ambitions.
The lights strobe again, and the dancers are in a different position.
The voices remain demonic; the beats are hard and relentless; and the choreography is precise and elegant.
At one point, two of the dancers carry Sophie around the stage like a three-person minicrowd surf.
Thats a running theme in this music questioning preconceptions about whats real and authentic, Sophie says.
She posits micro-worlds like genre, gender, and classical conceptions of the human being as inadequate.
They do not describe the present and they will not illuminate the future.
I wouldnt describe Sophies music as utopian, but elements of futurity and forward propulsion inhabit her work.
Its bad out here.
After dinner, Sophie and I stand outside the Italian restaurant in Los Feliz.
Maybe, she says, itll be musical.
