Sui Zhen
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Sui Zhen

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“Yes. Yes. Yes,” she says. “It’s like a little thing, a misplaced detail. I’m also really into socks. I’m always like, ‘What socks shall I wear today?’ I have equal amount of socks to everything else. I have two big drawers of socks. I have heaps of socks. Also, people know that they can ask me when they’ve run out of socks. I’ve got every kind of sock and I don’t even like patterned socks. I’m very specific.”

 

Sui Zhen is a Chinese-Malaysian name, and the two middle names of Melbourne-based artist Becky Freeman. She performs under both her birth monikers, as well as DJ Susan and in various lineups including Sui Et Sui, Fox + Sui, Andrew & Rebecca and NO ZU. Last year she released two cassette tape EPs as Sui Zhen – Female Basic and Body Reset – through Tokyo-based labels. She now has a new guise and a new album, Secretly Susan. It’s Susan who is the be-socked protagonist of Freeman’s surreal videos.

 

“It is an alter ego,” she says. “Susan actually started before any of the visuals, in the mixing phase. I was listening back to the songs and trying to find a link – I was just listing girls’ names. I wrote a synopsis for her, like, ‘Susan lives in a post-apocalyptic world and there’s no water left on the planet and it’s all pink’ – this sci-fi thing.”

 

Susan introduces herself in Take It All Back, her hand posed self-consciously on cheek as if in an awkward dating video: “Hi. My name’s Susan. I love the water. Sunrise. Sunset.” The character developed as Freeman worked on the album’s visual elements, which she takes full control over.

 

“Susan emerged. She’s an amalgamation of how people might represent themselves in their digital documentation. It was a way of characterising that. The more time I had, the deeper I went into crafting this person. In the visual media, I definitely take on her role. It’s nice to have a limitation to work within. It gives you a direction. It’s more defined in terms of what belongs and what doesn’t belong.”

 

Although Freeman is often in disguise in her self-produced and directed output, the songs on Secretly Susan come from the ‘real’ her. Taking influences from Japanese lover’s rock, ’80s electro/boss nova and dubby lounge music, the record’s laced with danceable beats and tropical, poolside pop.

 

“The songs relate to specific things to me personally,” she says. “This album is more about experiences from my life and different events that have happened. It’s more emotional in that sense. Though I didn’t always realise. You might be using your art form to process some emotional thing that you’re not actually aware of. Later you listen back and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I was totally singing about that’.”

 

As for the socks, they’re more than just an eccentric passion. In the uncanny and confusing dystopia of Sui Zhen’s Infinity Street and Take It All Back videos, one can’t help but try to find meaning and make metaphors.

 

“I feel like it’s quite representative of a lot of things I do, because I really like really simple pleasures and really enjoying them. There’s this not-scientifically-proven condition that people claim to have – it’s a bit of a fetish, and it’s one of the influences on the videos. It follows this idea of people speaking really softly and talking about everything they’re doing and tapping on things and making sounds.”

 

BY GEORGE NOTT