A. G. Cook has shared a long remembrance for his frequent collaborator and friend SOPHIE, who died earlier this year. The PC Music leader wrote about first meeting SOPHIE when they were establishing themselves in London and the many collaborations that ensued, from their work as QT to their team-ups with Charli XCX and much more.

“Sophie had her way with people – she could be critical, demanding, laid-back and mischievous all at the same time, an approach that turned everyone into a potential collaborator,” Cook wrote. “I know she made an enormous impression on the variety of people who (one way or another) became part of PC Music, and she would often raise people up, imploring them to pursue their individuality.”

Cook talked about the last time he saw SOPHIE in person before the pandemic, as she “she sketched out this idea of an extremely generous platform that would give listeners all kind of access to stems, fragments, and revisions of her music,” and about one of the last conversations they had together after she had moved to Athens, about “her new studio setup there and how inspired she was feeling.”

Here’s Cook’s concluding paragraph:

There’s a weird trick that I do all the time when I’m writing music, which I don’t often talk about. I think of friends of mine, people who I’ve collaborated with a lot, and I think, “What would they do?”. How would Charli flip this melody? What note would Noonie add here? What chord change would amuse Finn? How would Alaska turn this image into a lyric? Through everything, the easiest persona to summon has always been Sophie. I can ask her anything really – as long as its about music – and she’ll answer right away. Now obviously these funny avatars, these bootleg copies of friends that I hold in my mind are consistently inferior. The real Charli can effortlessly out-topline my own Charli simulation. But now for the first time I’m trying to access someone who has passed away, and I worry that her special voice might fade. Despite that, and with a weird certainty, something tells me that the voice might now be more real than ever. Maybe it really is her suggesting that I try recreate that sound using a different oscillator or make that lyric a bit more fun. Maybe she’s here right now, visiting from a place with no rules and no limitations. Maybe she’s become a part of me, a part of everyone who loved her in their own way. It’s indescribable, to have lost a friend who was so caring and so real, and whose presence was a constant affirmation of life itself. And it makes me feel just like we never said…

Read the whole eulogy here.