Three years ago, modern music lost a titanic innovator. Taken from us at the peak of her career, Sophie Xeon died in a tragic accident less than a decade after her dazzlingly progressive music hit the mainstream like a fluorescent paintball, its explosive splatter irrevocably transforming the face of contemporary pop. This seismic impact has resounded long after Sophie’s passing through an enduring influence that remains audible across the worlds of commercial and underground music.
Last week, Sophie’s legacy continued with the release of her second and final album, a self-titled project almost entirely produced before her death and completed by her brother and collaborator Ben Long. Fulfilling the roles of tour manager and studio engineer throughout the latter half of her career, Long co-mixed Sophie’s Grammy-nominated debut and was present during the development of the songs that would become this posthumous release, acting as both sound engineer and sounding board during its three-year conception.
A brilliantly eclectic collection of sixteen tracks, SOPHIE is the artist’s most diverse release to date, intertwining the various strands of her musical DNA in four acts that place ghostly ambient and feverish techno next to some of the most unabashedly accessible music of her career. Only an artist with Sophie’s kaleidoscopic vision could follow up a track like The Dome’s Protection – a seven-minute ambient epic that sets Nina Kraviz’s cryptic spoken-word to billowing synth pads – with Reason Why, a Kim Petras-featuring earworm that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Urban Outfitters commercial. Like its maker, the album rarely stays in one place for too long, but never falters under the weight of its own ambition.
“She would certainly be annoyed if it wasn’t coming out, if it was just on a hard drive somewhere... She would be like: ‘what’s the point of that?’”
Sophie is an artist that means so much to so many, and one that dissected notions of identity and authenticity in her work, so the prospect of a posthumous album is bound to be a delicate one. But, as Ben tells us, this isn’t some haphazard collection of unfinished bits and pieces, but a loving and conscientious completion of Sophie’s final project, orchestrated by someone that, both personally and creatively, couldn’t have been closer to her. “She would certainly be annoyed if it wasn’t coming out, if it was just on a hard drive somewhere,” Ben tells us. “She would be like: ‘what’s the point of that?’”
For many of us, Sophie’s genius was evident within the first ten seconds of her breakout 2013 single, BIPP: we’d simply never heard a sound do that before. It’s rare that an artist captures the essence of their style with such clarity in a release this early in their career – this is a process that can take decades – but Sophie’s unignorably radical, near-paradoxical sound arrived in our earbuds fully-formed, setting a sickly-sweet sugar rush of a vocal hook against some of the most mind-bending feats of synthesis ever bounced out of a DAW. Like much of Sophie’s work, it was unreservedly weird but instantly accessible, innovating without losing sight of pop’s primary objective: to excite us and engage us, to stop the world for a brief moment and make a song – or even a sound – all that matters. Sophie’s music was something that so much purportedly avant-garde music forgets to be: damn good fun.
In the years that followed BIPP’s release, Sophie remained anonymous, rising from enigmatic savant to in-demand pop collaborator and working with everyone from Madonna and Lady Gaga to Vince Staples and Charli XCX, who recently examined her complex relationship with Sophie on So I, a confessional cut from the astronomically popular 2024 album Brat. A run of early singles was collected on the 2015 compilation PRODUCT, before Sophie released her debut album proper in 2018. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides was a milestone not only in its stylistic leap forward, but also in its unmasking of Sophie’s image and voice, confirming her identity as a transgender woman through the video for It’s Okay To Cry, itself a moving paean to self-acceptance.
Precisely crafted, impeccably mixed and fronted with hooks that burrow into your subconscious and stay there for weeks: the talents behind her music were numerous, but for the production nerds amongst us, it was Sophie's sound design that singled her out as an utterly unique voice. Sophie’s sounds exaggerated the timbre of physical materials into a cartoonish hyper-reality, reconstructing latex, metal, plastic and elastic from raw waveforms into vividly bizarre versions of themselves that morphed in an instant from one imagined material to another, before vanishing in a cloud of bubbles or melting into a fizzy burst of lemonade. We talk metaphorically in music production about “sculpting sounds”, but in Sophie’s case, this captures her process quite literally.
You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, in theory, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?
“You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, in theory, and any sound,” Sophie once said. “So why would any musician want to limit themselves?’” More than almost any other artist, Sophie’s eyes – and ears – were wide open to the stupefyingly vast set of possibilities that modern music technology presents us with. In the face of this, most of us seek comfort in familiar, tried-and-tested methods that have worked for others, so might well work for us. Not Sophie, though. In her hands, synthesizers became a means of realizing sounds that nobody else could have imagined, and music technology became the tool with which she shaped a vision that stretched decades into the future. “I can’t get too excited about anything happening now,” Sophie said. “I’m really excited about what should be happening in the future”.
Outside of a musical context, synthesis is defined as the combination of disparate elements to form a new whole. This captures the ethos that Long tells us inspired Sophie’s final project; unifying her studio set-up to function like a singular instrument, she sought to create a continuously flowing album that embodied a studio session, a live performance and a club night all in one. Sophie applied this ethos across every facet of her artistry, breaking boundaries between genres and demolishing the walls between the mainstream and the underground, reconciling accessibility with the avant-garde and artifice with reality. And, as a transgender artist, the task of dissolving binaries such as these surely took on a far greater significance: Sophie’s music told us that pop can be anything we want it to be, and so can we.
Ahead of the release of Sophie's final album, we sat down with her brother Ben Long to find out more about the making of the project and gain a rare insight into the creative process of a generational talent.
Can you tell us about your own introduction to music-making?
“I was working as a music journalist, and then Sophie got me into working with her, just as a tour manager. I was setting up her equipment and doing sound checks. Gradually, one thing led to another and she wanted me to do more and more in the studio, working in a studio manager role. I did a course in sound engineering and it became full time, then I moved to LA. I was mixing with her, and then started producing as well.”
We understand that Sophie began experimenting with music production at quite a young age?
“Absolutely; my whole life, as long as I can remember. From the age of about six or seven she was making stuff on keyboards and drum machines. Cubase, back in the ‘90s. She was self-taught, always spending any pocket money on music-making stuff, whatever she could get her hands on. It just grew from there, but as long as I can remember, it was always electronic music that she was making, right from the start.”
How did Sophie teach herself?
“Occasionally we would watch online tutorials. Mix with the Masters, Pensado’s Place. She was never like, ‘okay, I know what to do now’. She was always trying to listen to little tips here and there. To be honest, not really with synthesis, because she liked doing her own thing with that, and she was happy. It was usually more related to mixing, like: ‘how can I make the kick drum snap?’, and these kinds of things. But most of it was self-taught through experimentation.”
What were some of Sophie’s early influences? We understand Autechre was a major touchstone…
“Sophie’s interest in Autechre came a little bit later. She was less into their ‘90s stuff. It was very much Draft 7.30 or Untilted onwards, mid-’00s to now, that was really the Autechre discography that she loved. But in the ‘90s, it was all the Prodigy, Pet Shop Boys, Orbital, Kraftwerk. Moby, before Moby became a bit more ambient and sample-based. Everything Is Wrong, that kind of era, the rave stuff.
“We loved all of that stuff. We had cassettes and CDs and my dad took us to raves and festivals when we were growing up. We were heavily into the earliest stuff from a lot of those artists. Orbital’s Brown Album, The Prodigy’s Music For The Jilted Generation, Pet Shop Boys’ Disco, and some of the early Chemical Brothers.”
What can you tell us about Sophie’s process and workflow in the studio? We understand she liked to work quickly?
“Totally, she really did. It depended what she was doing that day, if it was just her, or if she had a session or someone else coming in. If someone was coming in, she would usually work on some chords or something, just to have something to go in with so she could start straight away. She would want to have something so that she could just play it, have someone try some things on it, then while that's happening, be making the rest of it, the drums and whatever else, or figuring out the arrangement.
It was always very intuitive. Experimenting, trying stuff out, pushing things to the limit and never leaving something as it is, always trying a million different versions
“It was always very intuitive. Experimenting, trying stuff out, pushing things to the limit and never leaving something as it is, always trying a million different versions. Even if it sounds great, well, maybe it could sound even greater this way. Intuitive, fast, excitable - a lot of dancing in the studio. She felt that if something’s not going to be exciting to us now as we're making it, then it's got no chance. She liked to see how other people responded in the studio, and how she responded physically in the body, as well as thinking about how it sounds.”
Did she create and cast aside a lot of unfinished ideas in order to get to the end result?
“She absolutely was always starting the next thing. It was always more exciting for her to think, ‘okay, what can we do next?’ Finishing things always took a long time, because she was such a perfectionist, but also because either a live show was coming up or she had other material she wanted to work on, and that was usually more interesting to her.
“For the last album, Faceshopping, we had hundreds, maybe a thousand versions of that song by the time we got the final one. Similarly with a few of those tracks. To me, that was a very interesting process, and I did enjoy it, because that was more my background - what I'd started in was mixing, and I love that part of the process. I wasn't producing so much then.”
Could you talk us through your experiences collaborating with Sophie as a mixer and an engineer?
“Sophie used to say that she trusted my ears and that we had very similar taste. I think it was good for her - she wanted to have someone else there. Now, from working more on my own, I can see that it’s nice to be able to reference things, to give you confidence and to give you perspective. You can be four hours into working on a song and think, ‘am I making it better? Am I making it worse?’ You totally lose your perspective. Having someone there to keep you on the right track, there was a bit of that.
“I think she liked the analytical way that we worked together on final mixes, breaking it down and really drilling in on each section and any particular sound, whatever it might be, the forensic way we would go into things. We were quite similar like that.”
Can you recall any interesting moments from Sophie’s time working with mainstream pop and hip-hop collaborators?
“Often I didn't go with her to those sessions. More often than not, they were at big studios, if it was a big name. What would happen was she would come back from the session and go straight into her studio and work on whatever she'd been making. She was so excited when she'd been working with Kim [Petras] and Reason Why had come from that session.
Kim went up to the mic to do some vocal warm ups, just to get ready and get loose, and that pretty much became the hook
“She was amazed at how quick Kim was. Sophie was just like, ‘oh, my God, she's incredible’. I think Sophie had something playing, and Kim went up to the mic to do some vocal warm ups, just to get ready and get loose, and that pretty much became the hook. She was just messing around. So when Sophie came back to her studio it was just the chords and Kim's voice. She spent a few hours dancing to the same loop and working on that bass line, and then dropped it - that was a fun day.”
What was Sophie’s relationship with gear? Did she tend to test out new pieces of equipment quite often or stick to what she knew?
“It changed quite a lot over time. She definitely liked to try stuff out. She always liked to add to her system. Even if she was really happy with one thing, she would always want to look at what was next. How can I make this better? How can I adapt or grow my system? But in terms of gear, in terms of hardware, she definitely moved away from it. Largely for portability reasons; she liked to be able to make a song on the plane, or in any environment.
“I'm sure you know how much has been said about the Monomachine and how much she used that. Obviously she loved that, and still used that and other Elektron gear. But really, what was happening towards this album and the last year of touring, she was really moving towards just software. Whereas perhaps Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides was more like any other project where you're putting all kinds of different instruments together, she liked to think of the new album as if it was all one instrument. She was running Ableton like one instrument.
“She was putting a lot of work into how her Ableton was looking; the presets and the favourites and the plugins and the routing and even Max/MSP stuff. She really wanted it to feel like everything was there; she wanted to be able to do what she could do on the Monomachine, plus a lot more. She wanted to have all these things at her fingertips right away. She didn't want to have to plug stuff in or change inputs, outputs, any of that. It was all about getting it going quickly and having everything together.
It's somewhere in between a live show, a DJ set, and a studio session. She was trying to blur the lines of what all of those processes were
“Some of that comes across in this album, the idea of everything being one instrument. She explored more with the master tempo, there are some crazy tempo shifts in that techno section. The way that the songs bleed into each other, it’s kind of more like a DJ vibe. It's somewhere in between a live show, a DJ set, and a studio session. She was trying to blur the lines of what all of those processes were and make it all one thing.
“Her Ableton set up, especially with the Push controllers, was really enabling her to do that. She wanted to not even have a computer on the stage, really. She was talking with Ableton about something that has since become reality, the standalone Push. We were having to make these enormous sessions for a live show with hundreds and hundreds of tracks and inevitably, they would sometimes crash.
“Instead of going into more and more gear and more and more plugins, she was trying to use less; these last couple of years, when she was getting into Ableton, she was still using Serum a lot. She did a lot of synthesis on that. But then even after that, she was doing a lot on the Ableton plugins Wavetable and Operator. She was using them for a lot of the sounds, and using them in creative ways. She was getting to a stage where she wanted to streamline, as long as it could still be as powerful as she wanted it to be.”
So she was using the Push to write new material and come up with ideas, not just for performance?
“100%. I'm more used to Logic, and I learnt on Pro Tools, so I'm much more used to seeing the grid. So I'll always by default go into Arrangement View, whereas Sophie always worked in the Session View, even making a song in the studio, even when she was arranging. That just lends itself so well to her way of working, that intuitive way of working. And we're really lucky that she did that, because she recorded a lot of these live improvisations and jams in the studio when she was making stuff. So we actually have a lot more material than we would have in the old way of working.”
Were there any other plugins or pieces of software that she was experimenting with?
“For synthesis, it was almost entirely Serum. She liked to use Auto-Tune in creative ways. Reverbs, she always loved Valhalla Shimmer, all the Valhalla ones. Nothing too crazy, to be honest. After the Ableton switch, it was a lot in Ableton, and she liked to get in the back-end of some of the plugins. That was another good thing about Ableton, the modulation and the way it’s so open-ended. With one parameter on one plugin, you can be doing anything to any other plugin, that kind of thing. That was it, really; fewer plugins, but doing crazier things with them.”
Can you shed any light on Sophie’s synthesis techniques?
“A lot of her Monomachine synthesis, which she's most well known for, she had mastered that entirely by the time I started working with her. I can't say for sure. I know that she would often talk about it in physical terms - ‘this has to fizz more, this has got to have more bubbles’ - all those describing words and feelings, that’s how she went about it. We would discuss the sounds in those terms. But when it came to making them on the Monomachine, she was such a pro at that, so quick, and I’d never really used it, so I couldn’t really say exactly what her process was there. I helped in other areas, but she knew what she was doing with synthesis.”
It’s amazing that she could translate that kind of language, relating to the physical properties of objects and their sounds in the real world, into the parameters on a synth.
“So quickly, as well. Someone in the studio might say, ‘I would love to hear a bit more sparkle here’, or ‘this could shine a bit more’, and straight away she would have it.”
Moving on to the new project, could you walk us through a rough timeline of the album’s conception?
“A few of the songs predate this, but the album was conceptualized in 2018, around the time that Oil came out. Sophie was figuring out what it would look like and beginning to think about her next shows as well, because she wanted to tour in order to inform how the album would be, rather than do the album and then tour it. That was the way she worked.
We were 98% there. These were the songs, and there were still a few things that we were still discussing with the order
“2018 and 2019 we did a lot of touring, and she was working on some of these songs. 2020 we were locked down, and so a few more songs were written. We were in the UK then and we made a few more tracks for this album. Sophie was working in London, and then she moved to Greece, and was doing some work there. So that was a time where we were really honing in on it, and getting a lot closer to the final product.
“Over that time, she got bored of some of the songs. She scrapped a few and we were tweaking and honing, and it gradually came into being that this would be the final track list. We were 98% there. These were the songs, and there were still a few things that we were still discussing with the order.”
So the album was shaped by her experiences touring its songs prior to release?
“It really was informed by touring, because it's quite a party album. You can hear that on the record. I said earlier about how she was trying to blur the lines between the studio and the party and the live show and the club. Some of the songs were made in a house party environment; she would have a party, and she would start making a song, invite everyone over and in the room, pick up some of the people cheering. She loved that kind of idea.
“Similarly, she wanted the live show to feel a bit more like a studio session. We would have guest vocalists come on stage, Bibi Bourelly and BC Kingdom, and we did a few of these shows where she'd have a set-up with two computers and two Pushes and the Ableton sessions would be linked, and a guest producer would come on. It wouldn’t be a rehearsed thing. We did it with a couple of people on the new album, Big Sister and Evita Manji.”
There’s a real sense of continuity on the record, especially in that clubby section, where some of the tracks flow into each other.
“Totally, yeah. She thought of it in four sections, even though it's not that clearly defined. But that third section, the techno section that goes from Do You Want to Be Alive to One More Time - that was all done live, the arrangement was all done in one, like a DJ mix. It's like I was saying about her switch to Ableton - it wasn’t just about the switch to Ableton, but it was her way of working that changed, really, her process. That really informed this album, but it's something that had started before.
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“The Oil remix album was the first time that she started working in this way; thinking of it all as one instrument and being a lot more open-ended. This really lent itself to remixes and multiple versions of songs and a continuous structure. The tempo changes, the master tempo being so flexible in Ableton, and the ease of blending… I can't put my finger on the right terminology, but it really lent itself to those longform things and mixes. It was the remix album, and during the pandemic, she did the Heav3n Suspended livestream for a night that she played at Heaven, the nightclub. Those were in the same world - it felt like a similar process.”
One of the tracks on the new project that stood out to me the most was Intro (The Full Horror). It’s so atmospheric and sparse. What can you tell us about that one?
“That was the intro for the tour that was informing this album for a long time. She loved the tone it set, the mystery and intrigue of it. She had that for a long time as an intro and she used it in several things, but I remember one thing was added later, and that was the dogs. That’s the only other sound on the album, other than the vocals, that was recorded.
“It was recorded on her iPhone. We were waiting to go into the warehouse of the people who were working on the lasers for the tour. We were outside sitting in Sophie's car, it was a really hot day and there was a car in front with these dogs going absolutely crazy. Everyone else is like ‘oh, this is awful’, but obviously, Sophie immediately went over and recorded it. And while we're waiting for these people to come and open up, she’s got her laptop going into the car speakers, it's playing the intro, and she's bringing in the dogs to that track. If you were walking past that day, you’d hear the real life dogs, and then Sophie working on the sample of the dogs, with some crazy chords.”
As for the features, were these all recorded before Sophie’s passing?
“99%. There was one vocal that we recorded after from Live In My Truth, where the verse was empty. Logan and Chris in BC Kingdom were very close with Sophie, and they had discussed it a lot already, the content, and Sophie was into their ideas. So I felt like that was already there. All the others had already been recorded. In most cases, we used the original recording, even if it's just Sophie with a bad mic at Airbnbs or parties or whatever; she didn't mind that. She sometimes liked it; she wanted to capture the energy. She was more worried about that. But in a couple of instances, we did re-record the vocals. We left them as is, but just got a cleaner recording.”
Aside from the credited features, were any of Sophie’s former collaborators involved in the making of the project?
“No, other than just being around and being supportive. Certainly some of them came, and everyone's been so amazing, always asking if I need anything. Charli came to listen here a few months ago, and was really into it. AG came to listen. A few of the regular collaborators. I've played it to Felicita, Easyfun, the PC Music crowd, but not on ‘working on it’ level, no. We would have credited them if they had. As amazing as all these people are, I didn't want to bring another producer in, because I wouldn't want it to become a different sound. I really wanted it as best as possible to be Sophie's sound.
It's Sophie's last album. It was already there, the concept, the track list… it wouldn't feel right ever to do another one
“It's Sophie's last album. It was already there, the concept, the track list… it wouldn't feel right ever to do another one, putting Sophie's name on something or calling it a Sophie album. However, as you probably know, there's so much Sophie music, and she wouldn't want it to never be released. She wouldn't want a lot of these songs to go to waste, and equally, she wouldn't want to be too protective. So I'm not ruling out the fact that anything could come out again. It would need more consideration. It may be singles, or there's quite a few artists that she has unreleased songs with, so they might want to release it under their name. But as a Sophie album, this is the end, this is the last one.”
How much unfinished material is left in the vault?
“It's unbelievable. There's so much. Literally thousands of songs. Some are really loose sketches, but others are really fully-formed. More than demos, almost ready-to-go songs. There’s always been a lot of that, she's amazingly productive and she always created so much, and it's all there. I have all the hard drives. Since moving to Ableton, there's even more, because I'll open a project, and it'll be named after one song, but then I'll go to the bottom of the view, and there'll be three or four different ideas of songs that she's just started there, little sketches.
“There’s so much. I'm looking forward to going in with some close Sophie friends and collaborators and going through one hard drive at a time, getting our heads around it and thinking about things. There's so much there, but I think probably a little break after this album, because it's been a lot and I need to take a little break, but I'm excited about what's next.”
Can you recall anything Sophie said to you about her career ambitions beyond this project?
“She went up and down on it. At one point, she said she was planning to retire quite soon after the next album, or the one after that, I forget. But that was at the end of a particularly gruelling tour, so I think that was just a throwaway comment. In a more general sense, she did say that her idea was to do one pop album and then one experimental album and keep going in that cycle.
It was all about building this crazy party show and it was going to go around the world, and go from there. That was the idea; a lot more partying, a lot more fun, a lot more dance music
“She wanted to continue touring at the same pace, and she was working with more and more artists all the time. Even in the last couple of years, she already had a lot of collaborators, but it seemed like there were more and more - she was creating a real community. This album is a realization of the kind of thing she was moving towards. We did one show that was like that, at Brooklyn Steel with all these different guests coming, her friends coming to sing songs, friends coming to produce with her.
“We were working with some really good people. It was all about building this crazy party show and it was going to go around the world. That was the idea; a lot more partying, a lot more fun, a lot more dance music.”
Sophie’s music reconciled pop and experimental music so masterfully. Can you recall anything she said about bringing together those two worlds?
“Sophie thought anything could be pop and she wanted pop to be pushed to its extremes. I was talking earlier about the stuff we listened to growing up, and we often talked about how amazing it was that The Prodigy’s Firestarter got to number one. Out of nowhere, really, It sounded so different to anything at that time. There’s been a lot less of that since; you don't really hear stuff going to number one that sounds new.
“Sophie thought that just because something's popular doesn't mean it shouldn't be extreme. If anything, it should be really extreme. She looked up to Prince, David Bowie and all these people that were popular but were doing new things as well. She wanted to push music to its extreme; why can't it be popular, just because it's new or because it’s ambitious?”
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