How a bootleg download led SOPHIE to the instrument that would power her sonic world-building

In this excerpt from his new book, Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age, Liam Inscoe-Jones unravels how SOPHIE discovered the device that would become her most beloved collaborator: the Elektron Monomachine.

SOPHIE was born in September 1986. By the time she was ten, she was already a musician. Her dad was a raver, taking his children to see pulsing, mind-warping dance music several years before it was probably responsible. Nineties electronic music is a hell of a thing to thrust upon a malleable young brain, and SOPHIE’s dad did everything he could to ensure it stayed stuck. As he drove them from place to place, he’d crank Orbital and Moby cassettes so loud in the car that the glove box would rattle. In the midst of Britpopmania, he would disparage the music which was, once again, being brought back to the centre of the zeitgeist. Why obsess over decades-old rock ’n’ roll, he asked. Jungle, garage, trip-hop, trance…  didn’t people know that they were in the middle of a new revolution? Listen kids, this is the real sound of the future. 

All of this meant that, by her mid-twenties, SOPHIE was already familiar with – and bored by – the way traditional synthesisers and sequencers worked. She shared her father’s resentments about the infatuation with songs made by rock bands and recognised that many of the tools of electronic music were made to imitate a form of songwriting that those very machines had made redundant.

“Polyphony was required in the times of orchestras and even three- or four-piece rock bands of the last century because different shaped instruments would produce different sounds and timbres,” she told [Czech digital radio station] Radio Wave in 2014. “With synthesis, you can produce the full frequency range with one instrument, so there’s no reason to think about music polyphonically… It should just sound like one morphing, elastic, full-frequency spectrum composition.” What is the point, she asked in Elektronauts, in “a computer pretending to be a band from the 70s?” 

From the second she first downloaded the bootleg MP3s of Autechre Live at [Glasgow] in her university bedroom, SOPHIE began to trawl electronica forums to find out how they did it; how Booth and Brown had made sounds that seemed less inclined to play by the rules of the past. It was on those forums that she first read the name of the device that would become her most beloved collaborator: the Elektron Monomachine. 

Launched to market only a couple of years earlier, the Monomachine is a sequencer and synthesiser, first designed by its Swedish inventor for a university computer class assignment. Autechre were very early adopters, which made SOPHIE one too. Unlike the tools she was so critical of, the Monomachine is an instrument that allows its owner to involve themselves far earlier in the process of sound creation than almost all other synthesisers do; producing single-frequency sine waves that can be modulated and manipulated in a million potential combinations. Melodies can be transformed into percussion, or vice versa. The rules are off the table when it’s all just born in the box.

This work is usually prebuilt into most synthesisers in the form of presets, but starting at this primordial stage, you can essentially create a brand-new instrument every single time you use it… if you’re inventive enough. Many of the artists in the book – from Blood Orange to The Alchemist – work like collagists. SOPHIE, though, was trained as a sculptor, and she approached music like a sculptor would: making her materials from scratch and moving them to her computer to craft the finished piece. 

When SOPHIE finally got her hands on an Elektron Monomachine, she studied how to modulate its sine waves with one intention: to make sounds as muscular and tactile as Booth and Brown had inflicted upon that Glaswegian night. “This means considering the physical properties of materials and how those inform the acoustic properties,” she told Billboard in 2014. “Why does a bubble have an ascending pitch when popped and why does metal clang when struck, and what is this clanging sound in terms of pitch and timbre over time? How do I synthesise this?”

With this experiment in mind, SOPHIE began to assemble – completely from scratch – a living library of playable synths that mimicked the sounds made by real-world objects without ever sampling them. She created timbres that mimicked the whipping of corrugated iron or the quiver of an elastic band, and, because they existed in the Monomachine, each of those synths could be played as easily as the keys of a grand piano.

The influence of the Monomachine (which SOPHIE nicknamed her “little black box”) on her sound cannot be overstated. Over the years, she didn’t simply become competent at the Monomachine; she became a master of it. If her chosen instrument was a Stratocaster or harp, SOPHIE would be known, first and foremost, as a virtuosic player. She once met people from Elektron, and even they didn’t know how she was doing what she was doing. This masterful sound design is all the more impressive if you actually see a Monomachine: it’s a box. There’s no simple, intuitive interface; there are just rows of grey plastic buttons, which you need to learn intuitively before you can begin to get a single thing out of it. “These are synths that I’ve never heard anybody design before,” Canadian artist Backxwash said years later, “not even people who have been in the game for so long.” 

In London in 2012, SOPHIE worked from the basement of a converted Camden chapel, which she affectionately dubbed “the crypt”. While she was working, she would often venture out to watch classical concerts, just to witness the act of sound creation unfold before her very eyes. As she watched composers like Thomas Adès conduct their pieces, she observed the relationship classical music has with the underpinning of dance music: a low sub-bass undulating away, while the string sections played a melody in unison. When she returned to the crypt, she began thinking about those orchestras, and how the Monomachine could apply those principles unburdened by the bounds of reality. What if there were 2,000 violins playing at the same time? If there was a piano the size of a mountain, what would one of its strings sound like in a song?

SOPHIE began to write the songs that would become her first singles as early as 2010, but it took time to find a home for them. That changed in 2012 when [friend and former collaborator] James Cooper offered SOPHIE as a taxi service to a friend. Scottish DJ Jack ‘Jackmaster’ Revill had signed up to open a night at XOYO in London and close a set in Bristol that same night. He needed to get there fast. The  only person Cooper knew with a car was SOPHIE, and so he asked her to drive Revill. 

SOPHIE chain-smoked for the entirety of the drive. On the car stereo, she played her own demos for the first hour of the journey, and Bach for the second. Revill was intrigued, to say the least. He had recently launched the Glaswegian indie label Numbers, which was already becoming home to bright, maximalist future-bass by the likes of Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. As soon as he could, Revill quickly signed SOPHIE too. Soon, she sent him a song she thought could work as her first single. “When she sent us BIPP,” Calum Morton, co-founder of Numbers, told DJ Mag, “I smiled for about a month.” 

What SOPHIE had sent them had its inception in the music of Booth and Brown, but didn’t sound like Autechre at all. Absent were the ominous, knotty mazes of Untilted, or even the uneasy modernist collages of Exai, the album they had released that same year. No, instead, it sounded like the Spice Girls, squeezed through a tube of toothpaste.