No nation can advance unless the old ideals of exploration and adventure are lived. There must be lives lost in flying, as in every other step of progress, and as many lives have been lost in the past, but there is no need to run foolish risks. The search for adventure need not entail foolhardiness. Fear is a tonic and danger should be something of a stimulant
The intention of showing myself to the world has always been to be how I want to be and how I'm comfortable in the world, never to be anonymous. Right now, I'm just going with my instincts, and this is what I feel like doing. I'm always honest in what I put across.
I make my music to express everything I feel is necessary to communicate at a given time. Through music, I can express myself with statements that are more nuanced and more contradictory than factual details.
It could be confusing to people, but it's very simple to me, and it always has been - creating the thing that I want. In music, I don't think there's any need to be an all-rounder and do everything yourself. Play to your strengths and do what you feel. Or do whatever the material itself demands.
In the past, I've written my songs and then asked friends if they could record the vocals. I didn't want to use my own voice, because other people have much better voices. I was hearing the music with a voice that I don't have. It was a case of pulling whatever resources I had to get the sound I wanted, but that doesn't take anything away from the authorship. They are songs written by me that sound the way I want them to sound. Whether it's my voice or someone else's doesn't make a difference to the music.
Moment to moment, I'm very much just feeling and trying to synthesize what I'm taking in so it can come out musically. I'll continue to do that. I'm also someone who really likes to push themselves into new situations with new people and try to learn from them. I will be very happy to continue doing that, if people let me.
With a live music performance, the ideas of the richness and complexity of our inner and outer worlds - the emotional world and the external world, like the planets, the weather, and the universe are really washing over you. Your body feels the intention more than your mind analyzing intellectually too much. I've always tried to do this in my music, to make it very direct and bodily, so that it communicates itself immediately, even to someone without prior knowledge of it.
In a basic music way, my sense of melody and my style of songwriting and production carry the same thought process into the new music. I'm thinking about machines and electronics, and how they interact with motion, which I've touched upon in the past. Those key themes are my main interests, and they are really the foundation for my approach to music.
I get so much energy and I learn so much through collaborating with other people. Ultimately, I think the best music will always be created through collaborations - pooling together skills to create something bigger than any individual. I like to use my own SOPHIE material to present ideas in their most extreme, un-compromised form. I really use those opportunities to express exactly where I'm at in terms of production and writing ideas, as a document of my thoughts and feelings, as well.
When you're working with other artists, it's often a mix of your ideas with somebody else's, which can be extremely fruitful. But then it's also interesting to present the completely undiluted vision of what I imagine music could be. I care about both my own music and collaboration equally, and I pretty much split my time equally, as well.
I'm always trying to encapsulate how we, as emotional beings, interact with the world and the machines and technology around us - being able to emote through those things. They're not antithetical or mutually exclusive.
