Pop Just Lost One of Its Most Exciting Architects
The Scottish producer Sophie, who died at age 34, created addictive sounds that seemed to live inside the listener’s head.
Updated at 11:56 a.m. ET on February 3, 2021.
Electronic music is old—1800s-, earlier-than-Elvis old, old-enough-to-forget-it-needed-to-be-invented old. But it still sports the because it still offers the possibility of creating . In 1910, the laid out (though ) hope of early machine musicians: “The liberation of individual musical sensibility from all imitation or influence of the past.” Nearly a half century has passed since the chrome-y thump of Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summers’s “” made sex suddenly seem sci-fi. Jay-Z tried to proclaim the “Death of Auto-Tune” 12 years ago, and then watched as ear-teasing, cybernetic effects began to and .
