Sophie, an innovative producer and performer whose music distilled speed, noise, melody, clarity and catchiness into what would soon be called hyperpop, died in Athens after an accident on Saturday. She was 34.
The death was confirmed in a statement from her management company, Modern Matters, which said that Sophie, who was Scottish, had been living in Greece: “True to her spirituality she had climbed up to watch the full moon and accidentally slipped and fell.”
Sophie worked simultaneously at the experimental fringes of dance music and the center of pop, recording with Madonna, Charli XCX and the rapper Vince Staples. Sophie’s 2018 album, “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides,” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best dance/electronic album.
Sophie’s first appearances onstage were performed in near-darkness, concealed in a D.J. booth and avoiding photographs. But on tour in 2018, after she came out as transgender, she emerged at center stage, singing and posing in costumes and wigs that embraced both plasticky futurism and vintage glamour, as the music veered from brutal noise to lush ballad.
“A push and a focus in the Sophie music is to condense particular feelings down to the most concise, shortest form possible,” Sophie said in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “To try and create this immediate feeling, through sound and lyrics, that communicates itself instantaneously.”
A full obituary will follow.
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