Death is such a strange thing. I’ve thought quite a lot, lately, about how the white western view of the world, to the degree such a thing can be defined, is driven by the fear of it. Or rather, the idea of it as being a real, reckonable terminus beyond which something is lost. It hangs over everything as an event that must happen but never be thought of.
Even when, in the Christian church where I was raised, I was told that there is reunion after death, I couldn’t really believe that the people I would meet in heaven would be the people I knew. In the clouds we’d be scoured of something essential to us. How else would we be expected to find infinite joy in infinite choir singing? There seemed to be a rather extreme dissonance between a collective existence in heaven, simple and prostrate before God, and the existence of life, which was chaotic and heterogenous with so much stuff. Which is perhaps a long way of saying that the way most people tend to see themselves — as an irreducible something — seems necessarily something ended upon death.*
Living and thinking and writing in America has always been living and thinking and writing about the machinery of death and violence, and yet somehow 2020 still somehow came loaded beyond capacity with it. Largely due to my class background, I myself did not see COVID death pass through my immediate circles. But I reckoned with the fragility of my parents, and that of my own health, which deteriorated in a few ways. And I was working in hospitals through the first wave in Colorado, which was extremely intense.**
Latent goth that I am, I steeped myself, if inadvertently, in culture haunted by death. I began the year with a deep dive into the work and context of Yukio Mishima, who feared it so greatly that he loved and eroticized it. I crawled through the middle of the year with Mark Fisher and Robert Aickman, and a quasi-academic mini-tour through post-war Austrian literature, and then M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, a kind of gnostic meditation on the Holocaust. I spent the last few months listening to nothing except In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.
I wanted to name that which was always over my shoulder and in my dreams. It was all a low roar of terror. And as we know without being told, it was a year in which the political denial of death, and the demands of capital in the face of it, denied us any true mourning.
Few people can write cogently about loss because few people can write about ineffable things - and I mean ineffable less in the sense of “beyond the power of words to capture” (though it is that), more “something that never sits still”. In truth a lot of people have tried to describe grief but it’s never, for me or for people I know, been something that we can read on the page and recognize. The way it is experienced is always baffling. The first time you reckon with it, and perhaps afterward, it is shameful, like discovering you don’t truly want what you want to want. It just happens in your body, without your input or permission. Collectively, we were not allowed time or opportunity to experience that, because mourning meant stopping, which meant that money would be lost. We still aren’t allowed.
I think it is true that in some sense we give children pets in the hopes that they can know death before it comes for the people in their life. I knew death through cats and dogs but when the first person in my life died — a friend and roommate, who died in a horrible fashion that I, by chance, was spared witness to — something like a fog, or a heavy blanket, came over the subject in my mind. And while I could not actively think about it, neither did it harangue me at every moment of the day.
I felt, at the time, that there must have been something seriously wrong with me. And something wrong with the world, too, an injustice. There were people who saw my friend die, people who loved him and knew him all his life. He died in our shared apartment, while I was visiting family on a whim. If I hadn’t left, I don’t know what would have happened. But I wouldn’t have been one of the people spared the intimate knowledge of that event. I couldn’t get over why I was the one who could blind himself to what had happened.
Over the last year I have been approaching the idea of trauma — a word generally stressed and spread so readily that it feels like a tchotchke — as a kind of gnosis. That is to say, a secret knowledge that is not known unless it is lived and cannot be shared or disburdened in words. There is such anger to be felt as a result of knowing truth, such terrible loneliness, and not emptiness but fullness, a full and terrible cognizance. To have come so close to such a knowing and then (avoiding? Being spared?) is its own lesser trauma, “near death experience” in the sense of death being an actual physical thing that brushed past you.
There is still some guilt there I can’t let go of — I couldn’t face the people who witnessed, I didn’t know what to say, and I ghosted them even when they reached out to me. I have forgiven myself for how my body and mind reacted to death, but not for running away from friends in pain.
Grief being this kind of disrespectful freeloader with its own set of keys to your body and mind, I did not expect its arrival, at the news of the death of SOPHIE, any more than I expected the death itself.
There was a period, from around 2008 to the latter half of 2014, when I was spending all of my money and most of my time on music, specifically dance music, electronic music (not all of it was actually fit for dancing). It was nominally trend-seeking, but not really — I just chased what sounded good to me.
So I arrived to the scene as “bass music”, as it was called at the time (mostly two-step garage and half-step… dubstep), had reached its zenith in the UK and was breaking through in increasingly derivative forms across the pond. I was there, as they say. I was there when the Fabriclive mix series, #37 specifically, showcased Rusko’s unusually mid-heavy sound to a US audience, leading him to MIA and Britney Spears production gigs, leading to various rockstars and youtube account creators to pick up osc-laden synths and big, flat, laptop-speaker-ready snare drum samples. I wasn’t there for the festivals, because I was too cool, but I did dance to “Pump Up the Jam” while Pinch laughed and pointed at me from the stage at a modestly attended Cervantes’ Other Side show.
Back in Europe, where dense city centers and ubiquitous transit bred fertile nightclub scenes, things were progressing — which almost always meant tilling new crops of old sounds. Gloomy, tense halfstep producers started turning out gloomy, tense four-on-the-floor house, or they decamped to Berlin and turned out glossy, slick four-on-the-floor house. Footwork and Juke artists were plucked out of southside Chicago and flown across the Atlantic to be celebrated and stolen from, as their visionary house forebears were in the 80s.
In 2013, by the time something came around to the Boomkat plebians, it had typically been rinsed to death by big room DJs with exclusive access to the tracks. SOPHIE was no exception to the rule. Casting about you’ll find a lot of SOPHIE obits that speak to the futurism of the artist (abstaining from pronouns per the wishes of the artist’s camp), and that’s not precisely wrong, but SOPHIE didn’t materialize from nothing. As I remember it, the NUMBERS label had already fostered a reputation for maximalist club music (Rustie was the big name but I felt Redinho was underrated) but SOPHIE’s breakout “BIPP” on that imprint arrived at a time when producers like the Night Slugs crew and Pearson Sound (or as he was mortifyingly known, Ramadanman) had well-established a style of cavernous, airtight bass that SOPHIE’s sound, at least partially, sat legibly within.
More importantly, the aesthete tastemakers of UK bass, having taken all it could out of Chicago footwork and made it passé through their own imitations, were looking for their next (black, American) craze and seemed to have found it in ballroom house, which still lived healthily in NYC and Baltimore:
You’ll see it noted that the early teens had its share of dude producers taking on female-sounding pseudonyms (Karenn, Andrea, Patricia, Margaret Antwood, etc etc) and that SOPHIE was assumed to be part of the trend. It’s honestly hard to see why in retrospect — had anyone actually listened to “BIPP”?
I have to assume people got hung up on the Autechre-ian bass, because no cred-chasing cishet dude was making music this queer, this clearly enamored with pop, with nary a woodblock snare to be found. To be clear, it did legitimately sound like the future when it arrived — it still had juice when NUMBERS released it for sale — but it had identifiable lineage even so. It sounds like a ballroom crossover track to me. Later tracks like XTC Acid are, to my ear, explicitly indebted to ballroom. But more than that the nature of SOPHIE’s anonymity, at that time, felt different, not an affect or some play for Underground Resistance mystique. When SOPHIE came out as trans it was not surprising.
I fell off with the whole music thing, I have to admit. Ballroom was something I could appreciate but not enjoy, the high-pitched percussive nature of which was too reminiscent of electro-house for my ears (I hated Daft Punk and still do). I was nostalgic for garage, ascendant just a few years earlier, and so I knew that I, too, was passé, not even a real head but still an old head. I retired from being current rather than embarrass myself. So I wasn’t there to see SOPHIE develop beyond that one indelible, undeniable song. It still goes, as they say.
I remember when SOPHIE was, briefly, associated with PC Music, which I felt at the time was an insult to the artist. The movement was both an artistic bother and a kind of laundered orientalism — as though white people sought to encapsulate and recreate the specific cyberpunk uncanniness of KPOP as experienced by those same white people, passing off culture shock as commentary on view-from-nowhere monoculture and (vaguely) gender, without actually grappling with the racial implications of post-human or transhuman aesthetics.
SOPHIE, though, was above that, and always was. Like Rusko and Clams Casino before, SOPHIE crossed over to rap and top 40 production, the big leagues. SOPHIE was better, I think, than those (certainly better than Skream). I can’t remember who said it but it’s true: Hyperpop was made in the image of SOPHIE, and it’s a pale simulacra without the originator.
At various points throughout the last week, the face of SOPHIE has appeared unbidden in my mind, from the video for “It’s Okay To Cry” which, effectively, served as a coming out.
The face itself, which is beautiful and striking, does not dampen my spirits. There are artists who become like old friends — at a certain point, you stop being to one another who you were, but you remember who you were, who they were, especially if you were there at the start of it. There is still an earthy joy in knowing they are still extant and a gladness when you see them succeed.
SOPHIE has turned out to be in that class, for me. Part of it is that the artist’s death mirrored, uncannily, that of another artist who I loved intensely — Jhon Balance of Coil died, at the height of his powers, after a fall from his balcony in Paris. I was in Paris, not yet knowing who Balance really was, about to buy my first Coil album (a Russian bootleg compilation) from the Tower Records there, just around the time that it happened, and when I learned of it years later, I was spooked. Being near death and not knowing it. When I learned SOPHIE died I felt that echoing chill.
SOPHIE was brilliant, and a trans person thriving beyond the allowance of the monoculture, even as it conspires to take (and will continue to take) what it wants from the art. It’s not even that we’ll be deprived of what had yet to be made, because the product is immaterial. We are haunted by a stupendous future that we’ll never see. The bare fact of SOPHIE’s absence is the dimming of a light.
* I cannot speak to “eastern” or indigenous practice, trusting so little of what I think I know of it, filtered as it is through so much New Age appropriation. There probably is a difference between death-as-end and death-as-cycle. The world under capital does not easily really allow for life as though the latter were a true thing.
** I was not patient-facing, but infrastructural in role; I got to see how frantic and immense the response to a deadly pathogen was, at scale, and it changed a lot of things about my life.