Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker:
In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically strange objects: a rubbery squelch of a bass beat, a melodic line like a laser coated in latex, percussive punctuation marks that seemed to morph from plasma into steel. Sophie continued releasing singles, each one accompanied by a 3-D rendering of a ladderless slide. The objects looked the way the songs sounded, like uncanny candy—slick, chemical, jaw-breakingly hard.
At the time, not much was known about Sophie. She was associated with the collective PC Music, which specialized in the aggressively, gleefully synthetic. With the producer A. G. Cook, Sophie put out a catchy PC Music single called “Hey QT,” a promotional jingle for a fake energy drink, QT, which, in 2015, was distributed to concert attendees in a stunt at SXSW. This micro-era was a peak of absurd corporate branding in music—for the past few years, SXSW artists had performed inside a giant vending machine sponsored by Doritos.
more here.
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