Total TKO

!!!
https://www.papermag.com/sophie-album-ben-long#rebelltitem6
And what’s next for you, outside of SOPHIE?
I need to take a break for a few weeks, I’ve been working on this for so long. Up until we lost SOPHIE, I’d been beginning to work more on my own productions — my production was always much more technical, engineering and such — and it was really SOPHIE who gave me the encouragement and pushed me to do my own stuff. In my head, SOPHIE had been doing it for so long, and SOPHIE was incredible. So I was always nervous. I had been doing it more and more, and then it massively took a back seat the last year, because really this had to be my main focus. I’ve been learning a lot. The last few weeks I’ve been opening up some new sessions and doing things. 
And then, there’s many more SOPHIE songs that, like I said, need to be discussed in their own time. Some that include people who are on the album, some who are not, people have been asking the last few years, “When can we do this?” So I have a list of priorities, and a lot of them at that. I played a few unreleased bits at the friends and family party, and people were really excited to hear that stuff again. There is a lot.

If the goal was to make an album reminiscent of a SOPHIE live set then I say goal achieved. It doesn’t seem that far off from what someone would’ve experienced live.

Why are people so obsessed with knowing MORE than the people who were closest to her and collaborated with her?? We got 2 very in depth articles and you STILL have shit to say.
 
Also, SOPHIE was an experimental musician who THRIVED on messing with people, if you’re disturbed by “random beat switch ups” then that’s entirely on you.
 
You’re the problem here. Why force yourself into liking music you don’t actually have the capacity to understand, just to shit on it

I’ve been revisiting a lot of her old interviews and even up into 2019 Sophie often said that “the only kind of music is pop music” and other things along those lines. Seems like to her it just meant music trying to reach a wide audience. So I really do think, to her, this is a pop album. Many of the tracks would be considered pop by anyone’s standards, but as for the rest of them I think the fact that they have identifiable structures, tangible sounds, and vocals/hooks (for the most part), etc made them pop in Sophie’s eyes. I think an album Sophie would consider “experimental” would be so batshit off the walls that it might not even register as music to most people, so anything less than that is her exploring the possible forms and extremes of “pop” (which is hardly possible to define anyway). 
 
Also, plunging asymptote is a delicious rollercoaster of sensory confusion. There’s nothing else like it.

its also possible that sophie couldnt clear the sample for transnation. 

sophie trivia not a lot of people know: the entirety of transnation is not an original concept. its literally a cover of the piano mix of "House Nation", but replaced with transnation and more sophie-ish synths & sounds

“Completing the album became a family project for Benny and his sister Emily Long. She studied music law to work with Sophie, and she passed the bar exam two weeks before her sibling’s death. Once Benny resolved to finish Sophie’s album, Emily joined him in making decisions. “Every single day we talk about Sophie and what she loved and the things that would make her happy,” Emily said via a video call from Los Angeles. “We all know why we’re here. We’re all here for her.”
 

SOPHIE’s siblings Ben and Emily Long for The New York Times
 
Think this is the first time I’ve ever seen an image of her sister…
 

 
Kim Petras and BC Kingdom interviewed and photographed for The New York Times
 

resharing the potential droplets since it's basically confirmed there's more SOPHIE stuff that will be trickling out of the vault, via collaborators.

BC Kingdom EP
Big Freedia EP
Give It 2 Me - VIA BIG SISTER
Burn Rubber - VIA KKB
New York's Burning Down - VIA DOSS
Sunscreen - VIA LIZ & Tamta
Sfire Compilation - VIA Jeffrey Sfire
Unpredictable Reality - VIA Nina Kraviz

Take Me To Dubai - (Single?)
 
anyone have any other thoughts/hopes?

During the peak of the pandemic, Diamond cycled across London to spend a day together in Sophie’s home studio, “drinking iced coffee, lying around in her bedroom, writing the song, recording some rough vocals and just basking in friendship,” she said. “It ended up being the last ever day that I saw her in person.”
 
She remembered biking away, and waving back at her friend. “Sophie just stood in the middle of the street in this incredibly glamorous outfit, smoking a cigarette, looking like this complete vision of beauty, in complete calmness in this crazy time,” she said. “And she was just grinning at me and waving. And, yeah, I think about that a lot.”
 

There’s also another article on the New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/arts/music/sophie-posthumous-album.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ME4.KhV8.K-UgYYob37ae
”Sophie left behind many more tracks in progress, some of which are likely to emerge as singles or EPs, or appear on other performers’ albums. But as a guardian of Sophie’s catalog, Long has decided that “this is the last Sophie album,” he said. “This is an album that we had worked on for years. We discussed everything about it — the themes, the track list. So to do another album and put it out as a solo album, it would just feel all wrong.”
 

The Guardian interviewed Ben, their two sisters, Jeffrey Sfire, Marcella Dusi, Andrew Thomson, Banoffee, Cecile Believe, Hannah Diamond, etc
 
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/sep/20/sophie-posthumous-album-interview
 
“Sophie, the album, was completed after her death by Ben Long, Sophie’s brother and longtime studio engineer. Speaking from Los Angeles, Ben says that he and his siblings, Emily Long and Katy Grimston, did not take lightly the task of completing their sister’s final record. Present in nearly all of Sophie’s studio sessions in the final few years of her life, Ben already knew intimately how the album would look when his sister died. The 16-song tracklist, which traverses pop, ambient music and techno, had been roughly sketched out by Sophie, and for many of the songs “everything was there – the arrangement, the production”. According to Ben, some songs only needed a little bit of mixing and mastering; others were between sketches and demos, but he and Sophie had discussed them at length, meaning he knew in which direction they needed to be taken.
  The resulting album features longtime Sophie collaborators such as Cecile Believe, Hannah Diamond, Juliana Huxtable and Doss, and showcases the late musician’s interest in supremely challenging electronic music and euphoric pop. Intro (The Full Horror) is a soundscape built from ominous synth drones; The Dome’s Protection, featuring techno DJ Nina Kraviz, is an ambient, spoken-word song that feels clammy and alienating. In true Sophie fashion, the album is dense and unpredictable, never settling into the easy rhythms of a post-death tribute.”
 
-
 

“Hence the album Sophie, which flows through and was designed to work in tandem with a live show she had been working on. Many of the record sessions sprang, without plan, from social events. One such song was Love Me Off Earth, the album’s final track and a collaboration with New York producer Doss, writer Thora Siemsen and artist M Zavos-Costales. Sophie and Ben were two of the last to arrive at Siemsen’s birthday party in 2018, and Sophie bonded with Zavos-Costales through discussions about poetry and art. Sophie invited the pair to the studio the next day, where she “gave us some time to free-associate” lyrics, says Siemsen.
  “That play element was a big part of it,” says Zavos-Costales. “It’s easy to get caught up on a line or a verse, and if there was any moment where we felt a bit stuck, it was like: ‘This isn’t working right now, let’s focus on something else and come back to it.’” Love Me Off Earth, like Immaterial, is one of Sophie’s most transcendent pop tracks: loud, invigorating and skyward-soaring, in the way much of her best music is. “I want anyone listening to it to think about the sources of love they do have on this planet,” says Siemsen. “My main hope is that people dance to it at the club, that they listen to it in the car. I think it’s cathartic.” 
 
Other songs, such as the Diamond collaboration Always and Forever, and My Forever, a song with Believe, prioritise sweetness and more classically pop melodies than Sophie often played with. “She’d messaged me and was like: ‘I’ve been really missing you and I was thinking about how one day it’d be really cool to write a song kind of like Electric Dreams,’” says Diamond.
  My Forever also harks back to Sophie’s 80s obsession, specifically her love of Pet Shop Boys. “We were in the studio till the sun came up, basically,” says Believe. “We made it and then spent three or four hours just listening to it on loop – we knew we had made something that was such an emotional sweet spot.””
 

whats going on
 

toothless may be one of my fav gec songs ever 

guys no joke i matched with a guy on hinge and he told me he went to school with charli and she was tinkerbell in their school production of peter pan

coochie. coochie is so heavenly coochie what coochie where she's a genius 

Queen…
 
 
 

6k pages of horrible takes wow! congrats angels 

every august is XCXmas so it's only fitting if we get some good shit this month 

...is there something actually otw or are we just being delulu? 

notice how it's august again 

the dj was her brother afaik! (wasnt there but heard thru twitter). very wholesome

So she's the one that leaked it? 

its either a marketing stragedy or her label shelved the album but she still wants to release it

AR1 the new xcx world