Scottish pop music producer Sophie a pioneer in hyperpop

ATHENS • Sophie, an innovative producer and performer whose music distilled speed, noise, melody, clarity and catchiness into what would soon be called hyperpop, died last Saturday in Athens, Greece. She was 34.

Her death, after an accident, was confirmed in a statement from her management company, Modern Matters, which said that Sophie, who was Scottish, had been living in Greece and that "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 centre of pop, recording with Madonna, Charli XCX and rapper Vince Staples.

Her 2018 album, Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, was nominated for a Grammy Award as best dance/electronic album.

Her first appearances on stage were performed in near darkness, concealed in a DJ booth and avoiding photographs.

But on tour in 2018, after she came out as transgender, she emerged at centre 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.

Sophie Xeon was born on Sept 17, 1986, in Glasgow, Scotland. She was a self-taught musician, learning to make sounds with cheap synthesisers and inspired by her father's cassette tapes of electronic-music raves.

In the early 2000s, Sophie moved to Berlin, an electronic-music hotbed, and gathered a loose dance-pop collective called Motherland.

In a 2013 interview with Pitchfork, she compared music to molecular gastronomy.

"It's about getting to the molecular level of a particular sound - realising what that sound actually is made of, and why it behaves a certain way when processed or cooked. Then you use those molecules to build new forms, mixing and re-appropriating those raw materials and, of course, it should be bloody delicious," she said.

Heloise Adelaide Letissier, the French songwriter who performs and records as Christine and the Queens, said on Twitter: "Sophie was a stellar producer, a visionary, a reference. She rebelled against the narrow, normative society by being an absolute triumph, both as an artist and as a woman."

NYTIMES