New Music January + SOPHIE's Moon
ISSUE #139
The first time I heard SOPHIE's "Hard," I felt like my car was going to fall apart. I was driving home from my night shift at the front desk of a tower dorm, using new music to stay awake as dawn blushed over Iowa City's east-side cobbled roads. The screws shook loose on my old Taurus wagon, dubbed the “Space Wagon” by a high school girlfriend who’d thought it looked like an intergalactic shuttle, then the “Ice Wagon” later when the heat stopped working. With heavy-knit blankets draped across my lap, I prayed the whole song that the engine would last through the bedlam blasting from my stereo—the way you watch a Lego tower try to withstand a dog coming in from the yard. It was one of the most visceral joys of my life.
SOPHIE died this Saturday after climbing to take a picture of the full wolf moon in Athens, Greece. SOPHIE, who preferred not to use pronouns at all, was one of only three trans women (along with Teddy Geiger and Jackie Shane) to ever be nominated for a Grammy. SOPHIE's genius never needed the validation of such an irrelevant institution, but there’s something to be said for bringing home a prize that dad would recognize—a dad who introduced a young SOPHIE to electronic music as early as age ten, playing tapes in the car and driving to raves in Glasgow. Born in 1986, SOPHIE grew up just as the city was bouncing back from years of post-war decline. Artists moved to the manufacturing plants abandoned in the downturn and were finally able to open galleries and throw warehouse parties. SOPHIE became a staple amidst the flashing lights.
SOPHIE quickly gathered steam, taking this early exposure and springing it into the 2013 single “BIPP," and following up with “Lemonade” and “Hard” in 2014. In the same year, A.G. Cook brought SOPHIE to collaborate on “Hey QT," launching art collective PC Music into the limelight. To say that PC Music changed pop music as we know it is like pointing to water and saying it’s the giver of life. Electronic production changed almost over night, with every cool sound I heard in the late-2010s seemingly ripping a page from the book of SOPHIE, sonic sculptures of “latex, balloons, bubbles, metal, plastic, and elastic.”
In time, it was a personal rule of thumb that just about anything I thought was influenced by SOPHIE was probably actually written with SOPHIE, from XCX to “Hot Pink” by Let’s Eat Grandma to Vince Staple’s “Yeah Right” from Big Fish Theory. SOPHIE production sounds like a field recording strapped to a melamine rocket piloted by Jon Brion on speed, fitting as many crashes, whirs, clangs, bangs, and crumples that can fit inside a lumbering beast of a meter.
SOPHIE released a new single only days before the accident called “UNISIL," an unreleased track from the 2015 compilation album Product. I’ve fused it here with a compilation of my own as a break from the Earwyrms history lessons. These are the songs of note which were released this past month: a cut from Beach Bunny’s new EP which hews closely to Paramore’s After Laughter; South London’s post-punk act Shame and their brilliant barn burner album which stands as cousin to IDLES; Casper Clausen's eight-minute venture into seeing what would happen if U2 made an LCD Soundsystem song; and Lande Hekt of Muncie Girls delivering such a sharply lyrical solo record that I had a hard time paring it down to one track.
Then there's Sound Ancestors, a new release from Madlib, the crate-digger who brought the world masterpieces like Madvillainy when he partnered with the late MF Doom. It’s hard not to project Doom’s recent death onto this record, even if it was recorded before the news broke—Madlib learned of Doom's passing on social media like the rest of us. All three artists—SOPHIE, Doom, and Madlib to this day—have been profoundly prolific creators, driven to pushing boundaries of sound and rhythm, rearranging our expectations for music as we know it.
Music was Doom and SOPHIE's preferred form of communication. Both kept a veil of secrecy, leaving their identities in the dark when they could, but their enormous outputs prove that their withdrawal from media was no P.R. tactic just to drum up intrigue. They could always be found if you needed them. These are sounds of overflowing brains, like whistling we hear from the wind. Each had an innate taste for what the world had been without.
Madlib almost didn’t release Sound Ancestors when he heard the news of Doom’s death—it’s hard not to freeze in times of sudden grief—but a close friend convinced him that putting it out was a symbol of hope, a sign that one half of Madvillain is still here and carrying Doom’s spirit. When asked by NPR whether he thinks about mortality, he answered “All the time. [pause] I'm not promised nothing. Spirits come into play when you do a certain type of music; sometimes I'm not even doing the music, sometimes that's just sound ancestors. That is what I mean by that.”