IMMATERIAL GIRL

Sophie is gone. Her music lives on.

- JIA TOLENTINO

In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel. Sophie continued releasing singles, each one accompanied by a 3-D rendering of a ladderless slide. The objects looked the way the songs sounded, like uncanny candy—slick, chemical, jaw-breakingly hard.

At the time, not much was known about Sophie. She was associated with the collective PC Music, which specialized in the aggressively, gleefully synthetic. With the producer A. G. Cook, Sophie put out a catchy PC Music single called “Hey QT,” a promotional jingle for a fake energy drink, QT, which, in 2015, was distributed to concert attendees in a stunt at SXSW. This microera was a peak of absurd corporate branding in music—for the past few years, SXSW artists had performed inside a giant vending machine sponsored by Doritos. On the rare occasions when Sophie gave interviews, her answers played into the perception that the subversive intent of the PC Music project revolved around commerciality. She’d picked the name Sophie, she said, because it “tastes good and it’s like moisturizer.” Her influences were “shopping, mainly.” She wondered if music could work like a theme-park roller coaster, leaving you nauseated and laughing, then leading you to purchase a key ring. “Lemonade,” another brain-scrambling single, collected on a 2015 Sophie compilation called “Product,” appeared in a McDonald’s commercial for lemonade.