Sophie is Sophie Long, Scottish-born and Los Angeles-based musician, producer and DJ who’s musical choices have her on a path for electro-dance pop stardom as purveyor of overtly natural sounding synthetics.
In macro, she plays god –crafting and molding every sound in her sonic rolodex from scratch, using an Electron Monomachine and Logic to virtually house her extensive creations.
When I approach a Sophie song I find myself perplexed in the complexities of it all; the sounds are almost always referential, playing with and growing off of the lyrical content. The track “Lemonade” comes to mind, who's bubbling riffs and slurps lead into a thundering chorus that sounds the way a cold, refreshing lemonade tastes - sound becoming liquid by process of virtual citrus reamer. The uncanny valley, a synthetic sound becoming placeholder for something real, is fundamental to Sophie’s signature sound, one that feels like being in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and finding out that the snozzberries do in fact taste like snozzberries or in this case lemonade.
But why go to such lengths to create sounds that already exist, that could just as easily be sampled from life?
Her keen interest into materiality is at the heart of this; exploring what it means to be a natural, living thing experiencing emotion. Is there a materiality to being human, when being human comes with the feeling of being un-human? Can materiality be attached to our bodies, our hair, our skin, and what we put inside of it? If so, she’d go on to synthesize it.
Sophie romanticizes the mundane or at least what is mundane for contemporaneity – experiencing identity in our insta-zeitgeist, the pleasures of unrequited love, and non-social social interaction. To romanticize is to make us aware of the strange magic present in between the lines of the obvious. A world where a synth can sound animalistic and erotic. “Ponyboy,” a personal favorite of mine, finds favor in the dark depths of pitch and BDSM; virtual rips and howls are matched with the syncopated vocal track with the words “pony boy” echoed throughout. These sounds are then placed in a nightclub with glitter and horses - Lisa Frank on even more acid.
It’s this kind of sonic imagery that makes Sophie so interesting. A song can be both hard and soft, fast and slow, and express feelings of being real and unreal. Through the eyes of an android - there are complexities to human emotion.
Further, she presents a world that’s marked by being so natural and inherent that at a grand scale it seems unreal. I think back to the first time I saw “Honey, I shrunk the kids” and how seeing an 100 ft. lego brick threw me into my first existential crisis. Our perception of the world is so fragile. Sophie tries, and I think succeeds, at redefining what it means to be natural by what is virtually-documented by her body and by doing so creates a world that feels just enough removed from reality to be heightened.
Her song “Face Shopping” is anthemic for the age of Instgram, “ I’m real when I shop my face” she moans in an over-processed and reverberated voice while metallic tambours and malfunctions guide us through the track like the subtle rub of the smooth tool over a patch of dry skin. She falls further into robotic existential crisis as the rough chorus segues to a glitter filled bridge with the smooth, soulful vocal over top, “Do you feel what I feel?/ Do you see what I see?/ Oh, reduce me to nothingness.” She processes humanity like binary code, ones and zeros that when placed in conversation become sonic.
In person, Sophie is android-like, a walking figure of the uncanny valley, you can’t help but get lost in her bold lines and tall stature. Her stage presence shares all of this favor. It’s like staring at Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s, The Swing except you're in a dark warehouse and you can't feel your heartbeat over the rough bass. With a beat pad and synths she sways the audience like a conductor, they follow suit – pulsing like a colorful bag of skittles. The show is sexual in it’s textures - bodies being held up by other bodies, spilling liquor just to see how sticky the floor can get, and sound becoming a solid tangible field. I’s artificial and real all at once, a document of reality in that moment. I think back to early Neanderthals discovering that two sticks, when smacked together, can make sound and rejoicing in its auditory pleasure and how perhaps that same release was echoed throughout history and felt through my bones as I moved to the light of a disco ball. Although, Sophie’s music goes far beyond this sentiment, its relationship to sound as release, experienced through natural-sounding textures, remains.
Catch Sophie on tour:
9/26 TORONTO THE MOD CLUB
9/27 POP MONTREAL
10/12 KRAKOW UNSOUND FESTIVAL
10/13 OSLO ROVERSTADEN
10/14 COPENHAGEN VEGA
10/15 STOCKHOLM BACKDOOR
10/17 AMSTERDAM PARADISO NOOR
10/19 MANCHESTER SOUP KITCHEN
10/20 LIVERPOOL 24 KITCHEN STREET
10/23 LONDON FABRIC
10/24 LONDON FABRIC
10/27 ANTWERP FADED WEEKENDER
10/30 TEL AVIV BARBY CLUB
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Photographed by Jake Harrison
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