Art by Evan Solano
Michael McKinney is the Anthony Edwards of electronic experimental music journalism.
Early into That Moment, the debut LP from Sopa Boba, a boy steals a bit of cash from his father’s pocket. In response, the father severs one of his son’s fingers with an axe. The story is one of sharp escalations, of minor cruelties suddenly turning to something much larger. That Moment, which takes its title from a 2013 text by Moldovan author Nicoleta Esinencu, follows as a long-form exploration of corruption and power, a pitch-black and blood-soaked oratorio for spoken word, strings, and electronics.
In the world of That Moment, everyone carries a handaxe.
In the early 2020s, when the members of Sopa Boba—sound artist Pavel Tchikov, experimental-rock titan G.W. Sok, and dramaturgist Jean Vangeebergen—started work on what would eventually become That Moment, their eyes were focused on Eastern Europe. But then history lurched forward. In 2024, “we looked at the last chapters [from Esinencu], and we thought, What the fuck?” G. W. Sok recalled in conversation with POW. “It’s prophetic, in a way. I hide my fingers. It’s right under your feet.”
What might have started as an exorcism of sorts suddenly turned towards a new kind of urgency. With That Moment, Sopa Boba take a pile of artistic traditions— everything-at-once modern classical, screaming gabber and hardcore dance musics, hair-raising street-corner sermons—and defy them all. History doesn’t repeat itself or rhyme, it plays in a hundred registers at once. There’s dissonance everywhere if you know where to look.
In June of 2025, POW sat down with Tchikov, Sok and Vangeebergen to talk about That Moment, about decades of governmental collapse and frayed social fabrics, about radio plays and dirty cops, about opera and the value of a little insanity, and plenty more.
​​(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)