Touch Yourself: SOPHIE’s Trans Sound
The iconic producer made an interior that was HD, gooey and crisp, upholstered in melted chrome
Amalle Dublon & Sandra Wazaz
SOPHIE, “It’s Okay To Cry,” video still, 2018
[Image description: SOPHIE, nude, seen from below against a bright blue sky with white fluffy clouds, her bright ginger ringlets in a short bob and her glossy red lips parted in a slight smile. She is visible from the décolletage up, her arms in front of her body, her fingertips pressed lightly into her jaw. Her chin is lifted as she gazes calmly down at the camera]
Touch my, touch my, touch myself, self, self
fingers in, inside out
to turn out, inside out
upside down, inside out…
I can feel you now
—SOPHIE ft. Shygirl, “Inside Out,” 2020
color fiddles w itself
—eae benioff
Woman is constantly touching herself.
—Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” 1977
A while ago, a friend described her gender as for herself and her friends, not for the public; she recounted feeling trans when she became aware of her thighs touching in the shower. The feeling, or the story about the feeling, was contagious, and we can’t stop thinking about it—the event of feeling oneself, developing a kind of chronic sensitivity so basic and intractable that the constant rub of it opens up an interior space. Then there’s the question of how to harbor and take care of it, make that space habitable. We thought about self-touch a lot after musician, DJ, and producer SOPHIE passed away in January. Her sound is constantly touching itself, palpating the inner lining of an imaginary world as if to invite you to confirm its undeniable realness for yourself. Rarely availing herself of softness, fuzz, or other common auditory signifiers of atmospheric inwardness, SOPHIE made an interior that was HD, gooey and crisp, upholstered in melted chrome.
SOPHIE’s sound issued from and shaped the landscape of hyperpop, a subgenre recognizable more by its aggressive superficiality than by an attention to anything like an “inner space.” She frequently collaborated with hyperpop originators PC Music, a British label marked by cartoonishly distorted recycling of early 2000s consumer culture, pitched-up feminine vocals, and chipmunky synths. SOPHIE’s 2014 single “Lemonade” was seamlessly incorporated into a beautiful McDonald’s commercial, and “Hey QT”, her collaboration with PC Music’s A.G. Cook and artist Hayden Dunham the same year, was tied to marketing for a conceptual energy drink.
SOPHIE’s music is unequivocally about surfaces, with all that implies about superficiality, shininess, and smooth, modular commodities. But it is somehow also uncomfortably intimate. Its inner surfaces squeak and rub together like a balloon animal folded over itself. The sensory effect is overpowering, but it’s not like a proverbial wave or wall of sound that comes at you head-on. Instead, her production is hemispheric, slipping around you with an uncanny binaural realism. It feels like you’re inside it, and it’s inside you.
You can hear this vividly on a set she released last summer, a benefit livestream hosted by the LA-based party HEAV3N, which was uploaded to YouTube as HEAV3N SUSPENDED after transphobic trolls got Twitch to suspend the account. The livestream exemplifies her specific sound, a hyperreal ripple that’s somehow both squishy and hard, with palpable traces of familiar textures that are nonetheless impossible to tease apart: tinsel, amplified soft-drink foam, a gravely ooze that melts into a kind of sinister movie-trailer sound.
With the exception of vocals, all of these sounds are synthetic, made entirely from scratch. On “Not Okay (Alone Remix),” the second track on the remix of her album OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, we hear the familiar cadence that accompanies a dip, but the percussive crash of the drop itself is supplanted by a surround-sound effect, a juicy, slimy crunch, as if the person doing the dip had fallen through a sheet of glass in the sky. The sound is precise and implosive, like ice cubes tinkling in a glass as it's crushed in someone’s hand, and simultaneously as enveloping as a big-screen car crash, if a car crash could be somehow mucilaginous. Its scale and physical location feel both pointedly specific and mutually contradictory.
This sensory dislocation is a key part of the transport that SOPHIE’s music gives its listeners. Her use of wall-to-wall sound effects is vividly “realistic” while remaining unreal; big but microscopically detailed and ear-tickling, as if furred with papillae. The pleasure and discomfort of this high-definition sound, and the intense, almost awkward sensitivity it creates, are inseparable. It draws from the hyperreal sounds of commercials or ASMR, but without their real-world referents. Unlike sound effects meant to dramatize the world’s concrete mechanics, SOPHIE’s music is lifelike without corresponding to anything in the outside world.
Impatient with electronic music’s representational attachment to drums and strings, she potentiated its innate power to “generate any texture” from whole cloth, to “cartoonize and exaggerate … materials and organic phenomena that don’t yet exist." Her song titles, like “VYZEE” and “BIPP,” could be onomatopeias for the sounds of those not-yet-existing substances. That gooey crunch in the “Not Okay” remix takes the familiar syntax of queer club music and, like a childhood rhyme chopped and screwed, alters it to announce our entry into another dimension. In this dimension, things are inarguably real, too real, without ever ceasing to be imaginary.
The idea that an imagined inner world is actually real is a trans idea. This is one of the ways SOPHIE’s sound is trans: it atunes you to a feeling you can’t deny, but which can seem without apparent referent in the world. Why does it matter how it feels when your thighs touch each other? Why should you stake your life on it? SOPHIE’s music takes that feeling of becoming aware of an inner contact so unremitting that the only evidence of it is the fact of your own painful, pleasurable sensitivity to it, and makes it into a shared experience. Her music literally tickles, like the first time you try Pop Rocks, or get your asshole eaten, but it feels more intense than that because it’s an otherworldly inner cavity you can’t locate without practice, an unbearably real and imaginary sensation.
Addictive, delicious sound effects—squeaks, bloops, droplets, satiny glissando fronds—are certainly not new in popular music. Most of the time, they’re a kind of garnish used sparingly for emphasis, a bouncy little nub that you can’t help coming back for. Sound effects can be coveted and juicy: the gummies on your frozen yogurt, the blueberries in your muffin, a curlicue on a producer’s signature.
SOPHIE took this precious material and disbursed it with abandon, as carpeting and wallpaper, furnishing whole worlds in its drippy, squelchy, wrinkly textures. Imagine the baby giggle that famously punctuates Timbaland’s production of Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?”, but warped and tessellated so it covers every surface. She made treats into a meal. It’s a satisfaction rendered so unrelenting that it becomes uncomfortable; when they spent studio time together, Timbaland apparently praised her production style for going extremely hard. Like tripping, listening to her music also opens up a different way of sensing in general; instead of discrete sound effects that offer portholes into super-saturated perception, you can just live there all the time, now that you’ve been sensitized to it.
Perhaps for this reason, SOPHIE’s final EP, a remix of the entirety of OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, feels like it should have a sensory-overload warning, an auditory equivalent of the access notes that preface strobe or high-contrast visuals. A dance track usually has a kind of groove that you can enter into and move with. But SOPHIE’s music feels like it’s happening to you. Of the two of us, Sandra in particular listens to a fair amount of donked-out hardcore, but there’s something about the depth and roundness of SOPHIE’s production that’s more overwhelming than that, equally scary and raunchy. It feels like it’s relentlessly touching and tickling, and it’s hard to know if you can handle it, if you can give in, where it will lead. “I think [production] is everything,” she said. “It could be even more though. As soon as people's ears open up and they’re ready for it, then you can take it in very weird places.” We thought about a 1991 performance text by the artist Simon Leung that deals, in part, with traditions of anonymous sex, and the particular sensitivity to one’s surroundings that cruising inculcates. Playing on the idiom of pricking one’s ear, Leung introduces the idea of “an asshole for an ear,” invoking the ear as a receptive sexual orifice which can be trained to open, an organ whose vulnerability is erotic.[1]
SOPHIE described wanting to make music like a roller coaster ride: “afterwards your hair is all messed up, and some people feel sick, and others are laughing.” You can hear the acute power of her sound build over time; throughout her career, she produced music for other artists, and in some of her earlier work and collaborations, you can hear her specific sound surface for a moment in a texture or an effect that could make a whole track. Her duo SFIRE, with DJ Jeffrey Sfire, made music that sounds like synthy 1980s pop, vibey and danceable, if relatively restrained compared to her solo work. The juiciest part of their 2015 track “SFIRE 7” is a little ribbon of meow-vroom, unmistakably SOPHIE, and yet almost unnoticeable as it slips in and out. Slipping in unnoticed to do a kind of musical set design is one way to describe a producer’s work, and another way to think about the title of her first EP, PRODUCT. Its first track, “BIPP,” originally released as a single in 2013, opens with a swoopy ripple reminiscent of the sound effect in “SFIRE 7,” but here running unimpeded throughout the song, as house/disco vocals announce, “However you’re feeling, I can make you feel better.”
Before 2017, Sophie Xeon didn’t show her face as a performer, instead commissioning others to show up as frontpeople for her projects. She had held out against what she called “the hang-ups that people have about requiring an image to be attached with music.” “It’s Okay to Cry” was the first single and music video in which her unaltered vocals, face, and name all appear together. Its reception as a coming out song of sorts “disappointed” her. She had felt instead, she said, “like I could use my body more as a material, as something to express through and not fight against.” The difference between gender as public disclosure and gender as an expressive, sensory and sensitive material has everything to do with what her music opens up for us.
“It’s Okay to Cry” has an intensely quivery, vibratory quality. Sandra describes it as the shaky feeling of being seen by someone else in a way that’s not predetermined. Most of the music video is a continuous portrait shot of Sophie, nude in bright lipstick, lightly touching herself and whispering against a greenscreen backdrop of changing skies. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” she sings, “but I think your inside is your best side.”
Formally, “It’s Okay to Cry” is an unpredictable vehicle for a debut. Balladic, stripped of her signature sound effects, and not very dancey, it has little in common with the rest of her music. Yet somehow the combination of her discomfitingly direct gaze, whispered lyrics, and slightly shivery video performance exacts the same flayed sensitivity, a weird exposed-nerve feeling to match the physical and sensory vulnerability of her other songs.
This vulnerability is not in contradiction with the music’s slick superficiality. A dewy, waterproof surface can be protective, like an umbrella, or a full face of makeup. A reflective bubble is one way to contend with what it’s like to be looked at, named, and projected onto from outside yourself.[2] OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES is both an abstracted image of a glossy outer surface and a homonym for “I love every person's insides.” An alternate title was rumored to have been Whole New World/ Pretend World, before that became the name of the album’s final track. The proposition that every person’s beloved insides are, or could be, a whole world seems both central to SOPHIE’s sound and a condition of possibility of trans experience.
Like almost all of her work, “It’s Okay To Cry” is exhilarating and almost scary to listen to, because you don’t know how it’s going to touch you, or where it’s going to lead you, or leave you. This feeling is particularly intense now that she isn’t here anymore.
The unreal feeling of her music is rendered more confusing by the unreal news of her death: she slipped and fell while climbing up to look at the full moon. It doesn’t make sense that SOPHIE is gone, when her debut EP, already six years old, still sounds futuristic. Her sound is still so deeply influential not only because of its style, but also because it prised open an unprecedented mode of hyperreal feeling and perception.
Since her death, we’ve been looking for her everywhere, tracing her sound as it emerges within and dissolves into other artists’ work. And she is everywhere, rumored to have worked on Rihanna’s ANTI and Lady Gaga’s Chromatica. You can soak her up in the gleefully menacing prismatic ooze backing Vince Staples’ “Yeah Right,” and Shygirl’s aptly-named “Slime,” which she produced with Sega Bodega and Kai Whinston. Other people are seeking her everywhere too, as evidenced by the virtual altars erected in the YouTube comments on other artists’ tracks.
“It doesn’t make sense” is a common response when someone dies suddenly. The obituary is a way of making sense, of ordering a life through biography. How should we remember someone who understood herself as both producer and product—anonymous, ubiquitous, responsive and malleable—and who nonetheless went harder and harder after the specificity of her own ear, which is to say her sensitivity and desire, in a way that fucked and sensitized us all so hard we can’t unfeel it? We watch her in the process of making her sound more intoxicatingly, uncompromisingly hers, and the world in the process of being remade by it.
Simon Leung, “Transcrypts: Some Notes between Pricks,” in The Invisible Flâneuse? ed. Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2006).Vince Staples, after her death: “Sophie was different you ain’t never seen somebody in the studio smoking a cigarette in a leather bubble jacket just making beats not saying one word.”
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