Sui Zhen

NTS regular Sui Zhen has been hosting a show since 30 March 2020. Sui Zhen hosted a guest show on 4 November 2019. Sui Zhen has been played on NTS over 30 times, featured on 34 episodes and was first played on 11 August 2015.

Throughout Melbourne-based artist Sui Zhen's discography and performances, the experimental pop and performance artist has zoomed in on the intersections between human life and technology - how to exist in the digital age, as well as the ways in which we risk losing true sight of ourselves in the process. Today she's announced her latest chapter, Losing, Linda, which is set for release Friday 27th September via Dot Dash / Remote Control Records and is sharing the first single & video from the record 'Perfect Place'.

Losing, Linda pairs her signature inquisitiveness with a surreal electronic pop that possesses a dreamlike quality: vivid, uncanny, and upon close examination, revealing of deep emotional and personal truths. It's an album that examines loss on multiple levels - from the death of our loved ones to our widespread societal tendency to disappear within the ones and zeroes of modern life's tech-driven rush.

Losing, Linda's creation began back in 2016 when she took up an artistic residency in Sapporo, Japan. Zhen originally came to the residency equipped with demos conceived in the wake of her preceding breakout record, Secretly Susan - but real-life tragedy intervened, as her mother was diagnosed with cancer. In the process, a sense of overall mortality was unmistakably infused into the thematic structure of Losing, Linda. The video for the lead single, 'Perfect Place' introduces the character Linda, a ghostly apparition, representing the fragments of self, the avatars we leave behind after one dies in the physical realm -- but do our digital selves ever fully disappear?

After the residency came to a close, Sui Zhen's band members - instrumentalists Ashley Bundang(Zone Out, Hot Palms, Ciggie Witch) and Alec Marshall (Hot Palms, Emma Russack) - joined her in the Tokyo-adjacent city of Matsudo to track full-band demos for the material she'd written back in Sapporo. Eventually, she returned to Australia to be with her family, with work on the album becoming more sporadic as her mother's health declined, leading up to her passing in February 2018. "Looking back it was pretty intense," Sui Zhen says. "There's moments that occurred that haunt me still. And some of those moments have been recreated in my video project - turned into art, memories of memories."

After some time away from the album, Losing, Linda was completed near the end of 2018. The resulting record pushes the fascinating sounds and ideas of Secretly Susan further and deeper, drawing equally from the plush realms of Sade, Japanese city pop, the early electronic music of the 1980s, and the mournful swing of Tracey Thorn's early work. Sui Zhen cites a range of forward-thinking artists from past and present as inspiration, from Lizzy Mercier and Laurie Anderson to Holly Herndon and Suzanne Ciani.

On Losing, Linda, Sui Zhen takes the theoretical form of Linda, a digital doppelgänger and avatar invoking the e-learning channel Lynda and its founder Lynda Weinman, as well as the humanoid robot BINA48. The character of Linda is personified on the album's cover by choreographer and colleague Megan Payne, whose literal embodiment of Linda interrogates the disembodiment of online life, and calls into question the possibility of death in the digital age.

"It's an album about missing people after they are gone and trying to pre-empt loss - not only loss of life, but memory and information," Sui Zhen explains. "I see it mirrored in our increasing need for data storage. Why are we collecting and documenting so much, anyway?" "It's also a simple ghost story about being haunted by our other versions and our past selves," she continues. "Our mothers, fathers, ancestors - that possibility that another may exist, intangible in the physical realm, but ever present in memory, so long as memory functions."

The album will also be accompanied by a digital ecosystem, aiming to create an online world for listeners where they can interact in real time with Linda. "It's somewhere between a ghost, a memory, and a digital assistant" Sui Zhen explains. In other words, a perfect evocation of what Losing, Linda represents thematically and musically: a trip through the real and the uncanny. Losing, Linda is a lovingly personal and humanistic document of our ever-changing world, the things we lose along the way, and the insights we gain from loss itself.