Cool people like cool things, which is why we asked cool person Sofie Fatouretchi Royer to come on Perfectly Imperfect & redistribute her good taste.

Vienna’s Sofie Fatouretchi Royer is an artist of many disciplines— not only does she study painting at the University of Applied Arts in Austria but she’s the former Creative Director of the Boiler Room, been a Resident DJ at NTS since 2013, and in the midst of the pandemic she dropped her self-produced debut album, Cult Survivor, on Stones Throw Records. Her debut combines the baroque vocal style of 70s songwriters with lo-fi hypnagogic pop to create a lush, melancholy, beautiful, and melodic sound that I really love. If you like what you hear, be sure to check out the music video for “Hollywood Walk of Fame“ (made with Eugene Kotlyarenko) and know that she’s working on her second studio album! Sofie has great taste and lucky for us, she’s here to talk about what she’s been into.

Without further ado

Sofie Royer (twitter, instagram, website)

🎥 🏛️ Filmmuseum Vienna

My favorite spot to go catch a movie, they have retrospectives of the best directors and have an overall wonderfully curated selection of films. It’s run as a film archive as a non-profit, and consists of one very minimal screening room and a small cafe adjacent to it. Just hearing the way my shoes click on the white marble floor will already make me giddy — I’m so glad it reopened. Just before the pandemic caught one of my all time favorite movies, Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits there, on original restored film.

🤡 Harlequin clown lamp

I recently (finally!) after months of searching and not wanting to spend too much money, found the Pierrot clown lamp of my dreams on Willhaben (Austrian equivalent of Craigslist). He’s the perfect shade of a robin’s egg turquoise-y blue, I cleaned him with a toothbrush and some soap after having picked him up collecting dust in Vienna’s 22nd district, took him back home on the U-Bahn with me and we’ve been having a whale of a time ever since. I feel happy every time I switch him on.

🪥 🦷 Piave Toothbrush

I’m obsessed with dental hygiene and floss incessantly, and for a few years I’ve been buying these handmade, natural bristle Italian toothbrushes in different colors from my favourite 1920s brush & shaving supply store in Vienna, Walter Weiss. The colors on these make me happiest and I feel like both the size and the firmness of the bristles (I use a Soft for the morning, and the Hard variety as my evening toothbrush) are just what my teeth crave (a dentist told me electrical toothbrushes suck, and I’m happy to have made the switch back to analog — and even try brushing with my left hand every other day). When I was in New York I saw they’re being carried at the Eckhaus Latta store so it made my discovery of them feel just a teensy bit less special, but here you go. They make great presents, too. I couldn’t find them online! 

📚 Douglas Coupland

The one author I enjoyed most next to Bret Easton Ellis as a teenager was Douglas Coupland, my first introduction to him was his novel, Generation X, and everything else he’s written (especially Shampoo Planet, Polaroids from the Dead, Miss Wyoming, and All Families Are Psychotic) are wonderful works I’ve come to enjoy re-reading multiple times over the years. Great author if you’re looking to binge read all his books in one summer. Most recently I’ve revisited his Marshall McLuhan biography, aptly titled You Know Nothing of My Work!

🎵 Sofie - Cult Survivor

I realise this is incredibly self-serving but my debut album was released peak-pandemic, June 2020, so I was unable to tour it. A second album is on the way, but in the meantime, I’d love for anyone to listen in!

Follow Sofie on Twitter and Instagram

Listen to her debut album, Cult Survivor

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