Sui Zhen

Sui Zhen fuses electronic pop with performance art to probe the moral and affective dilemmas posed by digital life, crafting music that is both affecting and intellectually charged. Her 2016 release Secretly Susan paired reflections on curated online selves with an airy mixture of Shibuya-kei, dub, and bossa nova whose lightness mirrored the deceptive surfaces of the internet. The same understated approach underpinned 2019’s Losing, Linda, a work shaped by the passing of her mother and centered on technology’s reshaping of identity, mortality, and remembrance.

Melbourne resident Rebecca Sui Zhen Freeman launched the Sui Zhen project in 2003. Her first recording, the self-issued 2007 EP Sui Zhen, was tracked with producer Steeve Body at his Sydney facility. In 2008 she received the Golden Eye Award for Best Sound Composition for scoring Imogen Heath’s film 37 Scenes in the Company of a Rabbit alongside producer Jamie Lloyd. Following her 2010 participation in the Red Bull Music Academy, she issued the self-released full-length Two Seas in 2012, whose intimate folk-pop confessions drew critical notice; that same year she joined Andreas Fox, another academy alumnus, for the Fox & Sui EP Taboo.

During 2014, the year she joined the punk-funk ensemble NO ZU, Zhen issued the Japanese EPs Body Reset and Female Basic, marking her initial integration of electronic textures. Those influences, together with bossa nova, dub, and lounge, shaped the self-produced Secretly Susan, whose inquiry into virtual relationships and identities became her breakthrough. After that album’s reception, she arranged two residencies in Japan, yet her mother’s pancreatic-cancer diagnosis arrived just as departure neared. She proceeded to Sapporo, where the stay became a period for confronting grief and composing pieces that linked bereavement with digital mediation. Bandmates Ashley Bundang and Alec Marshall later joined her in Matsudo to develop fuller arrangements. Returning to Australia, she continued work on the project while nursing her mother, who died in February 2018. That year she also supplied a live score for the 2018 presentation of Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil. Released in September 2019, Losing, Linda wove spoken-word passages and the poised calm of Air’s sound into meditations on loss and digital memory.