Sophie Koella’s musical web of memories
With her deeply personal debut EP, “I want this feeling to last forever,” the French-American composer and producer captures a trance-like exploration of nostalgia.
Words by Juule Kay
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.
How would you describe the feeling that you want to last forever?
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.
Tell us a bit about how your deeply personal debut EP came together—about the creative process but also the things you processed on it.
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.
It’s all about emotion, memory and the echoes of the unlived. Can you elaborate on that part a bit more?
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.
