{"id":650,"date":"2021-02-01T14:40:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T14:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gcolemanmn.wordpress.com\/?p=650"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:17:09","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:17:09","slug":"immaterial-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/2021\/02\/01\/immaterial-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Immaterial Girl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published as part of the Digestable<\/a> newsletter<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world lost a beautiful human and a visionary queer voice this weekend when 34 year old musician and producer Sophie Xeon died in Athens. SOPHIE\u2019s uncanny hyperpop has been associated with the London experimental pop label PC Music, but her notoriety and the depth of her vision and artistry has always eclipsed that of the label.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this strange way of grieving her loss, I want to write about SOPHIE in conversation with materiality.<\/em> The materiality of an object is the relationship between its physical material properties – its softness, fluidity, heaviness – and the constellation of interactions and uses that surround it. As an example, sociologist Mimi Sheller discusses<\/a> how aluminum is sometimes called packaged electricity<\/em>, referring to the incredible amounts of electricity required to manufacture the metal. Aluminum\u2019s high embodied energy manifests in its material properties, namely lightness and strength, and these material traits create and reinforce a societal infrastructure of aluminum use patterns. Basically, the electrical energy that makes aluminum light and strong allows airplanes, cars, and packages to move faster and more efficiently. This societal coupling (i\u2019m sorry y\u2019all, grad school changed me, I just talk like this now) incentivizes the manufacture of more aluminum, and the use of more fossil energy to move even more things even faster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every aspect of SOPHIE\u2019s music engages materiality. Her calling card as a producer is\/was the incorporation of electronic instruments that evoke banging pots and pans<\/a>, whoopie cushions<\/a>, whistling tea kettles<\/a>, and more. Though these instruments sound like recordings of objects, like they have a material origin, SOPHIE created them by manipulating electronic waveforms – coaxing a synthesized tone into the shape of something seemingly material. SOPHIE\u2019s physical packaging also evokes and interrogates materiality. Her first album PRODUCT<\/em>, could be purchased as a CD, a puffer jacket, platform shoes, sunglasses, or a Silicon Product<\/a> – showing that the thing for sale is not any particular physical object, or even a set of recordings, but the idea that underlies the material. Lawrence Weiner<\/a> wishes. The cover of SOPHIE\u2019s second album<\/a> shows her in a gown made of crinkly\/flowing iridescent plastic and latex gloves the same color of her skin: materials you can hear and feel with your eyes, and that exist between fabric and packaging, soft and hard, natural and artificial. Even the title of the album OIL OF EVERY PEARL\u2019S UN-INSIDES<\/em> trans<\/em>forms from when you read it on a page to when you say it out loud – go ahead, try it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SOPHIE wasn\u2019t the first artist to engage with materiality in sound and consumer products. Queer electonic duo Matmos\u2019s albums Ultimate Care II<\/a> and Plastic Anniversary<\/a> create soundscapes and dancey tracks entirely from manipulated recordings of, respectively, a washing machine and plastic waste. PC Music project QT<\/a> (co-produced by SOPHIE) is a song, music video, and series of performances promoting a soft drink that cannot be purchased and is instead consumed by listening to the song. However, SOPHIE\u2019s work gains deeper traction by linking this interrogation of materiality to Trans identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prior to coming out as Trans, SOPHIE was reclusive with her physical self – masking her voice and using surrogates<\/a> in live performances. OIL OF EVERY\u2026<\/em>, whose lead music video It\u2019s Okay To Cry<\/a> functioned both as a coming out and SOPHIE\u2019s first fully embodied appearance, revolves around the relationship between who you perceive yourself to be and how others perceive you – a relationship mediated by your material body. It\u2019s Okay to Cry<\/em> promises \u201cI think your inside is your best side,\u201d Faceshopping<\/em> intones \u201cmy face is the real shopfront \/ I\u2019m real when I shop my face,\u201d Infatuation<\/em> asks \u201cWho are you deep down? \/ Who are you out there?\u201d and the climactic Immaterial <\/em>proclaims <\/em>\u201cI can be anything I want\u2026 I don\u2019t even have to explain\u2026 I can\u2019t be held down.\u201d By uniting this interrogation of the physical body as a mediator between gender identity, performance, and perception with images and sounds of manufactured materials that transform from rigid to flowing, dissolve into electronic noise, and exist between familiar and unfamiliar states – SOPHIE sought to create a <\/em>Whole New World \/ Pretend World<\/em><\/a> <\/em>where gendered bodies and manufactured objects can transcend the constellations of use and perception that surround their material properties and become something else entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I choose to read this Whole New World \/ Pretend World<\/em> as an attempt to escape the material world created around oil – the Plastisphere<\/a> as Matmos would call it. If you\u2019re going to talk about materiality, oil is the material to talk about. Oil\u2019s dense chains of hydrocarbons, literally the residue of millions of ancient lives lived and lost, allowed for the exponential growth in global (but mostly global north) energy use. Its fluidity allows it to be pumped out of the ground and shuttled across continents in leaky<\/a> pipelines without involving pesky labourers<\/a> who have the unfortunate tendency to unionize. And the ability of oil\u2019s hydrocarbons to be broken down and rearranged into different plastics, each with their own material properties, creates a dense network of societal uses and expectations<\/a> that equate oil with hygiene, sex, safety, mobility, and even sustainability by way of recycling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the Silicon Product of her first album, to the plastic waterslides adorning her singles, to the OIL<\/em> in the title of her second album, SOPHIE\u2019s material questioning has always centered on the oil\/plastic material regime. This is what continues to tickle my brain about SOPHIE, that her instruments sound like rubber and metal, but they\u2019re not. Her persona is\/was one of a plastic materialistic popstar, but she isn\u2019t. SOPHIE\u2019s Whole New World evokes the commodity fetishism, speed, and lightness of oil, but it dissolves just before you can touch it and what remains is the quivering question of who you are \u201cdeep down.\u201d By teasing us with uncanny images and sounds of oil\u2019s material world, SOPHIE\u2019s work tricks us into imagining a new one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing this piece I\u2019ve struggled on what tense to use, past or present. Sophie Xeon has died but her work still acts on me and sits in my body. I mourn for those who knew her, deep down her, those that knew the touch and presence of her body. And I mourn for all the life she can no longer live, all the words unsaid, conversations cut off mid-sentence, and worlds uncreated. But at the same time, Sophie was an alchemist – she could turn electronic vibrations into whoopie cushions and soap bubbles, and through her work was able to distill an uncanny elixir of life. Sophie Xeon was always mortal but SOPHIE is an immaterial girl, a self beyond herself, someone who\u2019s waves still ripple out – even now taking on new and unfamiliar shapes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published as part of the Digestable newsletter The world lost a beautiful human and a visionary queer voice this weekend when 34 year old musician and producer Sophie Xeon died in Athens. SOPHIE\u2019s uncanny hyperpop has been associated with the London experimental pop label PC Music, but her notoriety and the depth of her… Continue reading Immaterial Girl<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[20,26],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digestable","tag-music","tag-queer","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":737,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions\/737"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gabriel.town\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}