A rite of passage for any PC Music enthusiast, to have witnessed SOPHIE perform in her prime was truly something to behold. In my case, the lucky night in question – 23 October, 2018 at Fabric, London – now feels like a historical event, given her sudden tragic passing. Experiencing firsthand the unforgettable magic of an electro pioneer, I can still recall the thrills of an elated hyperpop crowd in Y2K glad rags. A glimpse of Sega Bodega at the bar preceding smoke, strobes and shrills; the red flame herself triggering tactile dancefloor vibrations with Monomachine improv and unreleased snippets of “Burn Rubber”, “Reason Why”, and “TRANSNATION”.
Among frenzied stage snapshots and high-res recordings is one effortlessly cool photo of SOPHIE leaning over the crowd, the elongated arms of two fans reaching out to light their idol a cigarette. Not to toot my own horn, but my fleeting capture of this moment does rather resemble the baroque composition of a Biblical art piece. Resurfacing every year for SOPHIE’s birthday, I suppose some kindred spirits must agree with me for it to have gone so viral. In the years since SOPHIE reposted my Instagram Story of the photo, I’ve felt a welcome embrace through fan art, Facebook groups, Reddit posts, and TikToks. Even a tattoo recreation on the forearm of a complete stranger, presented to me in the blink-and-you-miss-it smoking area haze of an Electrowerkz clubnight
Early in April, at my day job with The Line of Best Fit, I came across the contributor call out efforts of meg and Skip, the Bay Area couple behind WHOLENEW.WORLD – a recently launched passion project archiving the legendary work of SOPHIE. Built on comprehensively documenting live sets, photoshoots and interviews, the work-in-progress website is not affiliated in any way with SOPHIE’s estate, team, nor her former record labels, but simply exists as a fan-led means of exhaustive preservation. Links to all of her official releases and points of purchase are provided, and no revenue will ever be generated from the website, with all content remaining freely accessible.
Seeking anyone who has attended a SOPHIE performance, or has worked with or represented the cutting-edge trans icon, I get in touch to hand over my materials. “I’d actually been trying to track down your tweet of it because I remember retweeting it once but to no avail,” meg says of my viral photo. First meeting through ITZY quote tweet exchange back when K-pop met PC Music, the pair’s individual introductions to SOPHIE began before Charli xcx’s seminal “Vroom Vroom”.
For meg, there was the bubbly “LEMONADE” via a McDonald’s ad, then connecting the dots years later during a Vocaloid phase stumbling across “B Who I Want 2 B”. Skip came across a Shawn Wasabi SoundCloud mix, and a Samsung Galaxy S6 commercial with LIZ’s “When I Rule the World” on it. Serendipitous timing unfortunately meant neither had the chance to witness SOPHIE perform in person. “She played in San Francisco a lot, the venues are all like 21-plus, and we would have been like 15, 16 at the time,” meg confesses.
Come SS26, in tandem with Charli cradling all things music, fashion, and film, the trailblazer legacy of her close collaborator continues to manifest in a plethora of reexamined personal histories. “I lost someone who completely changed my life,” the pop star told Rolling Stone in June. Almost a decade after her death aged 34, SOPHIE production features in new drops like Kim Petras Detour track “Basketball”; Hyd (formerly QT) unearths “Makeover” and “Make Me Believe”. A surprise EP from New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia has made my summer feel unmistakably SOPHIE. Containing three hype pieces of combined musical magic, devised in 2016 at her LA home studio, it’s been a long time coming for hardcore fans like myself, pretty much raised on rare demos and low rip blog site leaks.
The same goes for meg and Skip, the latter affirms what many believe is accurate, that “SOPHIE could do, like, basically anything.” Her ability to create “these things that live in their own little universes” feels like special invitations, one-of-a-kind experiences. Deep cuts like “Get Stupid”, “it makes you want to dance, and that’s the best kind of music for me,” versus the echoing screams of “Infatuation”, like “waves of emotions hitting you, it’s a very visceral feeling.” Meg adds, the recently leaked instrumental “YOGHURT” is “so dramatic, so intricate… the most SOPHIE sounding SOPHIE song ever. I love how detailed she could get with her songs. ‘Pretending (Glasshouse)’ off the remix album, it’s a really weird song. I actually recreated it, I have this really old Roland Drum Machine.”
With SOPHIE gone, so much of her work continued to live precariously online. There was an awareness that your favourite live recordings could vanish at any given moment, despite a SOPHIE spreadsheet living on ProBoards’ PC Music forum. For some uploads, it’s been a pain to recover. “It has been about, I’d say, a year in the works,” meg says of WHOLENEW.WORLD. “I was really tired of that stuff just going down. Either the uploader, they delete it, or someone copyright strikes ‘Take Me To Dubai’, that’s the only song for some reason. So why don’t I try and centralise this into one place?”
It all started on meg’s MacBook, where reams and reams of organised, systemically laid out files paved the way for the project. “At least a fifth of the storage is consolidated just for the freaking website.” Skip recognised meg’s music tracking means as structured enough to make something out of: “What if we made this into a public resource and just release it to the world?” In a show of good faith, leaked material will not be hosted on WHOLENEW.WORLD. But meg and Skip are adamant to include information about SOPHIE’s discography (released and unreleased) in “an attempt to quell the rampant misinformation that exists around some of her work.”
Equally important to them is resisting the temptation to turn SOPHIE into an untouchable deity. Skip points towards pre-2000s Autechre, listening and poking around their discography in a way SOPHIE would’ve also appreciated; the electronic duo being an obvious inspiration of hers. “SOPHIE was a genius, I think that’s pretty indisputable. But everyone grows up in a certain context and is influenced by certain things, and she’s also discussed her influences,” he explains. “We think it’s cool, she is a person just like all of us. It’s a little weird when people really put her on a pedestal and stuff, not to be bossy about it.”
This philosophy perfectly captures what their archive is all about. Not placing SOPHIE behind museum Perspex, rather honouring the visionary qualities of an artist through a practical, matter-of-fact approach to curation. Embedded in its name and throughout its unfinished design, WHOLENEW.WORLD references the futuristic language surrounding her beloved OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES album. “The live set page deliberately mirrors SOPHIE’s own website archive,” meg details. “At least one person noticed it. If you go on archive.org and you scroll down to her live shows, it’s just a long stream of stuff in the same kind of format. She just kept adding them, she never removed them.”
Owners of the OIL vinyl will recognise a splash page inspired by the backside of a giant poster insert. Reload the front page, and it turns a bunch of different colours, mimicking SOPHIE’s tour posters with prominent colour overlays. “If you hold down ‘T’, it’ll give you a seizure, so don’t do that.” The pair have other layouts planned for the rest of the website. During our conversation, they flirt with the idea of reaching out to editorial photographers who had the privilege of capturing SOPHIE. “A lot of the magazines that she did interviews for, they’re gone now,” meg says. “I have to go through Wayback Machine, or just hope someone else has saved the photoshoot, and it’s best possible quality.”
I ask about making contact with Benny Long – SOPHIE’s younger brother, studio manager, and long-time collaborator: “We tried before the site actually launched. One of our friends, he actually had a chance to talk to him, so I was like, ‘Hey, can I have his email real quick?’ in, like, the most non-parasocial way possible. Didn’t hear anything back. I wasn’t really expecting to either, this fan base is crazy. It’s definitely something that I’m not expecting, but I’m like, will it happen? I have a feeling at least someone is aware of it in her family, which is kind of a scary thought, honestly. I really want to know what they think, and if they want to change anything. I really want it to fit within what they want because it’s her freaking family.”
Meg and Skip have never followed the SOPHIE tribute fan page route. They didn’t originally intend to create a social media account for WHOLENEW.WORLD. It’s @thegalleryofxeonism that wanted to do an Instagram post about it, quickly attracting submissions, messages, and further news coverage from Pigeons & Planes and Crack Magazine. “If you look at where people click on the link from, it’s almost all from Instagram,” meg says. Balancing site duties with full-time jobs, they didn’t expect press at all, but are happy and humbled by the warm reception. “It’s been great, not in, like, an ego building sense, but in the sense that we get to just build more stuff with it. It is definitely extremely motivating.”
“Going into it, we were just like, ‘Let’s make this convenient index thing,’” Skip adds. “We want more people to see who SOPHIE was, and these incredible things that she did, so that was it.” Fostering an online archive does not come without its limitations, however. The two are open about demotivating instances that certainly suck: “There were at least two people who had been to 5+ of her shows and said they’d take a look around, but never got back or responded to my several other follow up emails.”
Together, they’ve come across apologetic fans who’ve lost their precious photos and videos due to their old phones breaking or laptops dying. A lot of people who went to SOPHIE’s shows also just aren’t all that online anymore, or they’re professionals now, and contacting them through a simple Instagram DM just doesn’t reach them. “The fact that her name is so common too makes it hard to just search, you’ll inevitably get a bunch of other posts about other Sophies.” It all furthers the importance of not just archives like WHOLENEW.WORLD, but also the importance of archiving your own life.
What’s next for meg and Skip is continued SOPHIE detective work. Tracking lesser-known sets and obscure lost media, chasing new leads and staying in touch with hard drive holders. “I really want to try and get all of her SoundCloud stuff back,” meg manifests. “There’s this one track I don’t think anyone really knows about that I would love to be able to get. It’s called, like, Sophie Live Tokyo February 2011. That stuff, the weird jams, beats, pre-production EP that she had in early 2011.” There are countless other missing pieces too: a 2014 MoMA warm-up set; one in Brazil; one at Just Jam. “I’ve reached out to Just Jam several times, and they never respond to me. The one we have, it’s all glitchy and it sounds bad. I would love to have this in, like, actual good quality, and not something that was recorded on a potato.”
Scattered, ephemeral, and subject to lost media limbo, preserving SOPHIE’s work is difficult, to say the least. But WHOLENEW.WORLD is unique in its service of those who submit to the site, preserving experiential memories such as mine. Our call coming to a close, meg and Skip remember one fan who attended “a crap ton” of SOPHIE shows finally getting back in touch after exploring the archive. “They told me how they went through our website for, like, hours, and they just cried, reliving all these moments,” meg shares. “That’s a very special thing. It made me cry, I cried listening to it, and I cried sending them a voice message back. I think it’s amazing that our project has been able to have such an impact on people in such a positive way. I’m very thankful that it’s been received so well by everyone.”
