What is Out Of Body Pop?

I started my first student radio show whilst studing in Bristol in 2014. Around this time I was listening every week to Annie Mac’s Sunday night ‘musical hot water bottle’ show, which dovetailed with Benji B’s 1-3am Wednesday specialist show and a load of artists having a real moment (eg: FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Floating Points etc) to focus my music taste. Part of what I love about this experimental, but accessible genre of music, what I call Out Of Body Pop, is that we have really seen its renaissance in the last decade or so (sparked perhaps by Kanye West’s 808s/MBDTF period and the xx, two artists that inspired the second most commercially succsesful artist of the 2010s, Drake).

I used to call it ‘Transcendental Pop’, because this intense, expressive sound felt relateably human, accessibly warm, and yet also a tad alien, modern, seperate from the standard narratives of Pop. It reminded me of transcendental phenomenology; the study of stepping back and analysing human experiences – or ‘phenomena’ – in isolation. You try to make sense of this experience without referencing what we know about the outer world, looking down on it from above.

Two years later, whilst studing Social Anthropology in Edinburgh, I presented a student radio show named Out Of Body Pop. It was focussed on this flexible sound, and mixed in spoken word gathered from smoking areas, streets, podcasts, and a bunch of writing that hadn’t been recorded yet (I would get friends to record themselves speaking). Around the time I revived my old teenage blog with a post about the electronic side of this music, before starting off this blog right here. The main body of this blog collects the articles I have written and interviews I conducted, focussing on music that I find really exciting, that makes sense as ‘out of body pop’.

Who Am I

My name is Will Soer (@willsoer on insta), I’m an ex-tour guide, qualitative researcher, hardcore Phoebe Bridgers advocate, and a lover of music.

More than anything else, I’m interested in people, their subjective experiences and the way they express and define themselves, (particularly through music). I was initially bullied when I moved to the UK aged 11, and it was music that helped me develop confidence and connect with others; I’ve been all-consumingly obsessed ever since (scroll to the bottom of my previous blog if you want to see what teenage frustration smells like).