Q&A: SOFI PUXXI’S ‘SOFIA DIES BACKWARDS’ COMES TO YOU FROM THE FUTURE
WRITTEN BY DEL HENDRICK
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Based in San Francisco, Sofi Puxxi is releasing her debut full-length album Sofia Dies Backwards. She operates within a mix of the techno, synthpop and indie electronic genres. In doing so, she maintains a truly otherworldly, whimsical and beautiful sound. She gains inspiration from an astounding variety of artists as well several works of fiction ranging from eccentric online works to classics. Her music emulates Daft Punk, Porter Robinson and Grimes in a feat to create sound that conveys techno-optimism.
It is vastly difficult to properly describe electronic music because it often defies the typical conventions of other genres, but Puxxi’s music is something else entirely, inventing its own universe and story like it’s taking listeners on a ride through the cosmos on a spaceship. The album is stunning, futuristic, haunting — endlessly replayable. Sofia Dies Backwards makes you want to think, to dance, to make art, and most importantly, makes you want more.
Sofi Puxxi elicits excitement, bliss and curiosity. Her song titled “Ekpyrosis” definitely inspires rebirth. Her distinct titles invite listeners to learn as well, about “Apophenia,” the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns or connections within random data, which includes related lyrics such as ‘I felt you thinking of me so I turned my thoughts away, you’re always dreaming of me,’ and “Unobtanium,” featuring apropos lyrics like ‘just hand me the weight of the world; I’ll make you a deal, I’ll find you someday.’
Starting with the creation of the universe in “Dubstep Made the World,” Puxxi parts the curtain of her album, sustaining a note of creation, which leads into “Ekpyrosis,” led by strong vocals intertwined with brilliantly layered instrumentals that support the themes of destruction and rebirth. Following that cycle is “Unobtanium,” and then “I Have No Mouth And I Must Sing,” reflecting the same innovative, eerie tone as its namesake, with the words ‘do you remember me? From the future, I wrote to you before you were you.’ “Apophenia” is next, filled with uncanny echoes that lend it a spectral— yet still tremendously danceable— vibe, and then “Esoterica,” a word which refers to highly theoretical knowledge. In a similar vein, the song carries a fast pace and airy, gorgeous vocals. Finally, the album concludes with “Technostalgia!” Sporting slow-building sonics and literal applause, “Technostalgia!” begs you to do as the lyrics say, ‘just get back up and dance, dance, dance.’
Life on Jupiter is ecstatic to be sitting down with Sofi Puxxi to talk about Sofia Dies Backwards.
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LIFE ON JUPITER: Your tenacity with your genre and individual sound is captivating. I’d love to know how you define ‘techno-optimism,’ and how Sofia Dies Backwards manifests as such. What vibes, aesthetics in life and culture, experiences and feelings have driven the formation of this album?
SOFI PUXXI: This is a beautiful question from which I could probably write a whole essay. I was born and raised in Houston, so my entire life I've been in a place dense with culture and art and diversity and really cool people. However, I was also a supremely online kid, so the experiences that most heavily shaped me honestly were playing video games and YouTube rabbit holes. Something particularly poignant in my life was the experience of growing up online and going back to Colombia to visit my family, and still being chronically online there, particularly being able to connect with my cousins through video games.
The first time that I remember music really affecting me was actually playing Geometry Dash in the car with my brother and my cousin in Bogotá (and then getting ridiculously carsick). I remember hearing music from the levels and feeling my brain getting rewired in real time. The same thing happened to me with DDR and that whole strain of Eurobeat music. This album is sort of the cumulative result of all my experiences in life so far. The thing that really made this album possible, if I had to name one pivotal event, was moving to San Francisco earlier this year. Here, I started meeting people whose worldviews intrigued me and overlapped with mine in interesting ways.
To me, techno-optimism is inseparable from art and the careful and intentional imbuing of beauty and imagination into new tools. There’s a reason Steve Jobs put so many of Apple’s resources into the iPod and iTunes - I think he saw music as the ultimate art, and technology as a means to spread it. I also see it this way, and I think we’re at a unique point in history where there will be a Cambrian explosion of art due to AI and advances in tools for artists. Something I was directly inspired by was advances in vocal technology, like Grimes open sourcing of her voice, Charli xcx’s intentional over-autotune, Porter Robinson’s use of Vocaloid technology in Worlds, and Daft Punk, Giorgio Moroder, and Kraftwerk’s popularization of the vocoder. Coding custom plugins with Claude and layering and styling my voice with AI in my bedroom was the thing that made me realize I could actually make music, and there were going to be new ways to do it. I think there’s a huge taboo around using some of these tools but it will fade; this is going to democratize making music for millions of people in the years to come. My goal is to reach the limits of what is possible musically with technology while retaining a sound that is unmistakably human and unmistakably mine.
The title of this album and all of the songs are so fascinating. Where did the title come from? How did you decide on the names for the songs, particularly “I Have No Mouth And I Must Sing,” (is it related to the short story?) and “Ekpyrosis”?
PUXXI: I’ve always been obsessed with science fiction and technology. My best friend and I have a specific framework that is very important to us about reincarnation that draws from the short story The Egg by Andy Weir. She and I basically agree that she is a soul from the past, and that I’m a soul from the future that reincarnated backwards in time. That is what the album is really about.
The title Sofia Dies Backwards itself is also a reference to a YouTube sci-fi short story by exurb1a called Upsilon Dies Backwards. It can’t be summarized here in full, but it had a really massive, outsized impact on my life. It essentially is four different plotlines nested together. To me, it is about the cosmic significance of the plot of everyone’s lives, and how they all feed into a grander universal narrative. It’s really dope and unnervingly profound; everyone should watch it. More or less, my goal with every song title was for it to be confusing. I thought it’d be fun for people to search the titles up and end up going down a rabbit hole. Ekpyrosis means “cosmic fire” in Greek and refers to the periodic destruction of the universe by a massive fire, followed by its rebirth. That song specifically was more of an ode to the very ancient past, as opposed to the rest of the songs which were much more future-facing in theme.
“I Have No Mouth and I Must Sing” is a spin on the sci-fi horror short - I wanted to tell the story of an AI being who just yearns to sing and make music, and having no way to make art except through humans. But that song is also about my inner conflict in accepting the direction the world is going in. I think this is pretty overt in the lyrics: ‘Why do I bring you here / Won’t make our lives more real / Why do you need me?’ It is about the unease of the future, but in the face of it, retaining hope that there is going to be a lot of beauty in the result. I think the next generation of musicians and artists will be the force that makes the whole world hopeful about technology.
I’m also very curious to know how this all fits into the framework of the album. Is there a story within each song, a specific order you envisioned? It very much sounds like you’re creating a world for us to listen in on and journey through.
PUXXI: The entire album is kind of about things that cannot be explained by linear time and causal structures. (This ties into Upsilon Dies Backwards again, where the main idea is that a star explodes backwards in time, and that as a result you share stardust with only exactly 34 people in the world, and these are destined to be your soulmates).
The music creation process is truly fascinating in that it feels like something that assembles itself. In reality, there’s not so much a story to the album as a feeling. For me, when I make music, it’s not clear to me what the actual content or melody or lyrics should be; I just reverse engineer everything out of the feeling I’m trying to evoke. And for me, the feeling of this album was a kind of obsession with the future and a deep, deep yearning to see it now. And simultaneously realizing I’m living in the time period where it may actually be possible to see all the things I’ve long been obsessed with.
I’m very fascinated by retrofuturism and the feeling of futures that were imagined but never came. I think that’s the main feeling I try to put into music form; there’s this multiverse of possible futures and the one we actually end up in is always unknowable. “Unobtanium” is a reference to the movie Avatar, but it broadly means a hypothetical material or element that is impossible or impossibly difficult to obtain. That’s sort of how I feel about my sound as an artist. I can somewhat recognize it in other songs, but I know I am not able to create it yet, because I know I have a lot yet to learn and improve on and refine, but also a lot left to experience and metabolize into song form. This album I see as a proof-of-concept, like a V0 that barely scratches the surface, but it is also the first piece of music I’ve ever made so I know it’s going to be close to my heart forever. It's kind of like a first love.
I noticed in “Esoterica” that you veer into Spanish at the start. This doesn’t happen in any of the other songs. Does your experience with language overlap at all with the word ‘esoterica,’ and how does that drive this song forward?
PUXXI: Yes! I actually didn't notice this at first, but it is the part of the album where I am by far the most vulnerable and direct, and it's shielded by Spanish. Spanish was my first language. As I started writing music, I realized there must be something about the muscle memory of a first language, because I actually find it way easier to sing and write lyrics in Spanish. It feels like they come directly from my subconscious, but it took the songwriting process to even realize that.
I called the song “Esoterica” because I was super into esoteric philosophy during the time I wrote this song, but also because it is just the feminine form of the word esoteric in Spanish. It’s actually the only song on the album that felt like it got directly airdropped to me. The lyrics and melody just came out of nowhere. And it was very fascinating to me that it happened in Spanish, when more than 90% of my life these days happens in English.
A friend of mine told me this song feels like leaving somewhere comfortable to venture out into a new place, and not knowing if it was going to be worth it. And then it turns out it totally was. But you still feel the pain, and the nostalgia, of what you left behind. It’s like feeling the opposite of regret, but retaining all the heaviness. This wasn’t even my read of the song when I wrote it, but I think she’s 100% more correct than I could ever be.
While I ask this to every artist I speak to, I am so curious as to what inspires you. Are there other songs, films, stories, or events that have contributed to Sofia Dies Backwards or to yourself as an artist?
PUXXI: There are so many. One of my biggest inspirations in media is the film Tron Legacy. I watched it when I was around eight years old, and I remember it was the first time I felt such awe and reverence due to a piece of art/media. This is in large part because Daft Punk made the soundtrack, as I would later find out (I still listen to the soundtrack almost daily).
To me, Tron was almost like a neo-mythology for our time. It’s such a corny movie but it is so ambitious in scope. It was the first time I watched something that introduced me to the possibility of machine-borne consciousness, digital worlds and of a single technology that would bring forth a better world. I think it was when everything clicked for me.
Daft Punk’s influence on my life cannot be overstated. Same with Porter Robinson. I feel such a deep admiration for them and a kinship with them both because they both feel like they were obsessed with fictional worlds, and they created them alongside their music, like with Interstella 5555, Shelter and Virtual Self. They clearly have such a vision with everything they do. And I think they both changed the course of electronic music profoundly.
Grimes, of course, is a huge influence for me as well, and I got to do a DJ set with her recently, which was beyond dope. Recently, I have been extremely inspired by people creating music with their own interfaces, like Imogen Heap with motion tracking gloves, DJ_Dave with live coding, and people using Touchdesigner.
And then obviously, I am inspired by my friends and loved ones in subtle, ongoing ways every day.
How did making music start for you? Has this been a goal for a long time or is it a more recent development?
PUXXI: It’s been super flip-floppy for me - I started making music when I was 14 and I discovered the MrSuicideSheep YouTube channel and found artists like Seven Lions, Illenium and Porter Robinson and got completely oneshotted. I made beats and played the piano on and off for a long time. A lot of it happened when my personal life fluctuated between exciting and boring, like during COVID and during winter breaks.
Electronic music was always my number one love in the world but I had a lot of difficulty accepting it and leaning in. I actually feel like I tried everything to avoid it for a long time - I tried exploring a bunch of different jobs, becoming interested in so many sectors and technologies. But ultimately, I took a music production class my senior year of college and realized that it was part of my soul, for lack of a better phrase, and it was inescapable. I truly started going into music when I was doing an internship at Apple Music a couple of years ago and Logic Pro was free on my computer. I remember distinctly making beats in the Apple office and realizing it was my favorite thing to do in the world. It consumed me for a whole summer.
Thank you so much, Sofi. Lastly, what’s next for you, whether that be in terms of music or other exciting future endeavors?
PUXXI: I have a lot of optimism about art and where it’s going to go. I’m excited to hear and see stuff I’ve never seen before. I think that new sounds will come not just from very talented engineers in sound design like Max Cooper, Arca, Underscores, Flume and other trailblazers of the genre, but also a range of physical instruments, many of which have not yet been invented. I really want to get to know people in this space building experimental synths and such.
I also want to do as many cross-genre collabs as I can because new sounds emerge from unlikely collaborations. In the next year or so I want to invest in the music community in San Francisco and throw live events to meet other DJs and release possibly another EP or album? Definitely though, making way way more music.