SUI ZHEN
New album Losing, Linda Out Now
+ Shares video for ‘Matsudo City Life’
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Praise for Sui Zhen – Losing, Linda
RRR Album of the Week | 2SER Feature Album |RTR Feature Album | PBS Feature Album
“The third album from the Melbourne-based pop futurist Becky Sui Zhen is tied up in the achingly personal – her mother’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer. But it wouldn’t be Sui Zhen if she didn’t apply a high-concept framework to the universal experience of loss.” – The New York Times
“Losing, Linda, is filled with extended, haunting meditations on loss and love and life that swirl and disintegrate, solidify around Sui Zhen’s mantra-like musings and then dissipate.” – Stereogum
“It’s her most perfectly realized project yet.” – Bandcamp
“Its presence can’t be placed; it’s always beyond, just out of reach.” – Pitchfork
“another absolute gem… darkly whimsical and dream-like” – Gorilla vs. Bear
“sparkling, ethereal” – Resident Advisor
“Mesmerizing…” – The FADER
“Bossa nova rhythms, melancholic dance beats, and synth-led melodies echo memories of earlier decades just as they map new pathways through pop.” – STACK
“eerie, alluring synthpop” – Brooklyn Vegan
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Sui Zhen has today released her critically acclaimed new album Losing, Linda via Dot Dash / Remote Control (AUNZ) and Cascine (ROW). To celebrate she has shared the music video for ‘Matsudo City Life‘.
Speaking about the video, Sui said “Where Perfect Place touches on the artificial in its pristine, dreamlike atmosphere – a rose tinted memory, Matsudo City Life is the gritty cityscape, reality with the cuts and bruises and darkness we too easily forget. The Red Room represents death and decay in contrast to the Perfect Place. It marks the shift between the two places in Japan I spent time writing music. My Sapporo experience being romanticised in memory as spacious, mountainous, peaceful – a meditative daily practice and the Matsudo one feeling stifled, claustrophobic, forgotten in the dilapidated glamour of an old love hotel.”
Sui Zhen zooms 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. Her latest chapter, 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.
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.
The album is also 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. You can see the first stage of the digital ecosystem HERE
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Purchase / Stream Sui Zhen – Losing, Linda HERE
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Sui Zhen
Upcoming Live Performances
Sunday 13 October – Howler, Melbourne (Full Band)
Losing, Linda Album Launch
Friday 18 October – Sideways, Canberra (Solo)
Losing, Linda Album Launch
Saturday 19 October – Freda’s, Sydney (Full Band)
Losing, Linda Album Launch
Friday 25 October – Altar, Hobart (Full Band)
Losing, Linda Album Launch
Saturday 9 November – Peel Street Festival, Melbourne (Solo)
Saturday 16 November – Scienceworks, Melbourne (Solo)
Saturday 30 November – Strawberry Fields Festival, Tocumwal (Solo)
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Sui Zhen
Losing, Linda
1. Another Life
2. Natural Progression
3. Matsudo City Life
4. I Could Be There
5. Mountain Song
6. Being A Woman
7. Different Places
8. Perfect Place
9. Night River Rider
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