Sophie Koella’s musical web of memories

Memories are like waves, a frequency of their own. Remembering evokes a range of emotions, a cleansing tide. For emerging artist and fashion muse Sophie Koella, also known as sofii, it almost felt like processing a tornado of thoughts on her freshly released 4-track EP, “I want this feeling to last forever.” The self-produced meditation of songs was born from the necessity to process and find inner peace, weaving electronic textures with mantra-like repetition.

After a decade of modelling and working alongside Erwan Sene on the music direction for fashion shows like Courrège and Jean Paul Gaultier, the co-founder of Paris collective and event series More Hard Feelings is claiming her voice as a solo producer. It’s a sonic memory lane of remembering and reimagining—including a 3-minute voicemail of her grandma checking in on her and a meaningful text message from a dear friend. A reminder of genuine connection in-between the chaos of human emotions and its aftermath.

The initial feeling I wanted to last forever was falling in love. I guess I am a little bit cliché, and I'm OK with that. I wanted to capture this fraction of a second of an emotion as it begins to manifest in your body and mind and isolate this specific moment of stillness.

I had been doing some musical compositions, but I was always depending on other people to produce the actual ideas that I was having. The project itself wasn't AT ALL made with the intention of making an EP. When I went to LA back in December, where I grew up, it was like an emotional comedown of the entire year. I had so much shit to process and needed to be occupied to not go insane. I didn’t leave my room for eight hours a day to confront my fear of the software, which has been very intimidating to me, and started making these tracks in my bedroom basically. The interesting thing is that I was not really exposed to and never really listened to ambient music—it just came organically out of me.

There were a lot of what-ifs in my head even though I believe everything happens for a reason. I speak a lot about anemoia, which is nostalgia for things you haven't experienced yet. While I was processing my emotions, my mind simultaneously was escaping to these alternate realities. I decontextualised and recontextualised them in a context in which I had control of the narrative. It was this weird entanglement of reality and fantasy that was helping me to cope with everything. It was actually the first time I realised that music, or any art form for that matter, could be used as a tool to externalise your personal emotions.

I think it depends on the context of the memories. Some lie dormant and pop back up when something triggers it. I'm a very visual person and very sensitive as well, so I can remember things very vividly and exactly how they’ve looked and felt in detail. There's something really beautiful and uniquely human to this kind of reconstitution of past events and happenings. Revisiting them is really essential in the process of moving forward because you need to process certain things to be able to let go and move on.

I remember being on tour in Switzerland with my dad, who’s a classically trained violinist, when I was a teenager. I remember it was a really hot summer day, the windows were open, and we had a view of this really beautiful lake. I remember being obsessed with CDs. I remember each CD would get exploited like crazy—I would listen to it every night for a month on repeat. I remember falling asleep to the Gipsy Kings. I remember my sister when she was a baby. I remember her as this foreign creature that I loved a lot, but somehow her presence intimidated me. I remember being in ballet class every single day for three hours after school for ten years.

There’s this meditative thing to it. I like its predictability, its simplicity. I've been modelling for 12 years and haven't been in a position to utilise my voice and express myself—hence using my voice is so important. The words are like an instrument, a repetition of loops. I'm not calling myself poetic in any shape or form, but it's some weird form of poetry to me. By the 10th time you’re hearing a certain word, is it evoking the same emotion it did the first time you heard it, or is it bringing you to another place of reflection?

I haven’t really thought about that. It’s not so linear. It’s not so singular. I can be a little mystical sometimes, but I am very pragmatic and rooted in known things. The sentence is actually from a text message a friend sent me when I was having a hard day. What they meant back then was that for every bad emotion, there is a good one, too. So I was like, “OK, I’m going to make a song now” in the cliché way that I am [laughs].

I would describe it as being atmospheric and mantra-esque, a bit trance-like in its intentions. It's rooted in a form of personal dialogue, but I think my intention with my music is to create a universe that's my own. I want people to engage and resonate with it. For me, being listened to is very important, as I haven't felt very listened to in the past—and I have a lot of things to say, actually. I don't need a million people to listen to my music. I don't care about numbers. I don't care about quantity at all. If it's just touching one person, I'm so grateful.

Sophie Koella’s 4-track EP, “I want this feeling to last forever,” is out on June 27th via Soul Feeder.