Album Focus: Sui Zhen

So firstly, how do you pronounce Sui Zhen? 

My name is pronounced soo-ey chen, its my middle name, it’s a Chinese name.

That name that you use, its one of your alias’, can you tell us a bit about the other names you go by? Like Sui et Sui and DJ Susan?

Sui et Sui was what I was using for my live band. The first performance of that band was just me and my sister. She also, being my sister, has a Sui prefix name, which is something that my grandfather gave to each of us, a Sui name. It’s a trio that I formed for band shows really. DJ Susan was just my DJing thingy, my DJ vibe (laughs). This whole Susan thing has emerged over the last 18 months or something, and obviously now with the new album there’s this whole Susan persona. 

This whole persona of Susan, where has that name actually come from?

I was working towards a video and I had all of these ideas to create a kind of persona that was consistent throughout all the songs in the release. I’d written down a bunch of names and Susan just kept popping up, and I liked the reference and ideas attached to that name already, like its alliteration in pop culture like Suddenly Susan and Desperately Seeking Susan, it had a catchy ring to it. Then I built up the character and alter ego and developed the concept for the visual that I would create. 

Your sound is interesting, its obviously inspired by Brazilian Bossanova and Japanese ‘80s music, how would you personally describe your sound and its influences?

I’m not sure, because I’ve got a lot of diverse influences, not just musically, that I would have absorbed over the many years., I wanted to progress my traditionally structured songs and my style from 2014 into a more electronic realm and start producing stuff that was a bit more dancey and groovy. A lot of the records I started to create or music I was listening to just happened to be from a particular era where they would use a combination of live instruments, live performance, live percussion and then blend that with an analogue drum machine and analogue synths that had a particular sound of that ‘80s era, when a lot of that stuff was manufactured and produced. That’s pretty consistent throughout Secretly Susan. Looking to other music that used that, it does orient towards creative Japanese producers who utilised those kinds of instruments. I like it when other cultures appropriate other things, one culture’s rhythm gets a bit lost in translation and it begins to sound like a new and interesting genre. 

With Secretly Susan, what was your songwriting approach? It’s interesting because your sound is obviously a lot more production based, how does that process of writing music when it’s within such a heavily production-oriented genre like your own?

Most of the songs on the album were written either with a guitar or a keyboard at first, then through production maybe you’ll remove one of those elements if it was being carried enough in the vocal or carried enough through another thing, you realise, ‘hang on, that guitar is just playing rhythm now it doesn’t really need to be, let’s take it out’. There’s a process of elimination and trial and error that you can have a lot of fun with when you spend a lot of time on production and sometimes you can just create a bit more diversity. When you’re in a drums and guitar based band the essence is the band, but when you’re production focused you find essence in other ways. It’s about finding essence on a song-to-song kind of basis. This particular album has a much more considered approach to song writing.

You are obviously really into the whole photographic and directing side of music, directing a music video for The Harpoons last year, where does that interest come from?

I’ve always been a visually expressive person. In my late teens and early 20s I was not sure how best to channel that. I went to uni and studied creative writing and did video art production but being a musician at that time I wasn’t sure what creative path I would totally dedicate myself to. Music seemed like the most intuitive that at the time was the least resource intensive and was the easiest, really. I ended up focusing on music and trying to find over the years how to fit this interest in making visuals whether it be film or photographic, into my music. Recently I’ve decided to put all these visuals into my music and thought I’d see what happens with that and its actually been really awesome. I didn’t realise I’d already had the foundation made by having been a musician all this time. It’s a really nice part of the process. 

You’ve got a really minimalist, clean and meticulous aesthetic in your sound and your whole visual appearance, why is that and what was it inspired by?

It’s funny you ask this question, I had a Nozu (other band) rehearsal last night and I’d had a really long day at work and uni. I was being a little brat like, ‘it’s too loud, why is there so much shit going on!’.  I think it’s got something to do with control, I like simplicity and I like things that have been considered. For me when there’s so many ideas going on its about picking the right idea and feeling confident with it. I like being really bold about certain decisions, because with my sound particularly in Secretly Susan, I definitely err on the side of simplicity when it comes to the recorded format or finishing a video. The videos. especially. I just like focusing peoples attention to one very specific thing. It’s like I’m really speaking to my limitations and working within my own set framework, maybe the next one will be a totally different feeling and tone and colour scheme and different things will be explored. But they will be executed with that same kind of tightness, which is just my taste. 

Originally published in X-Press Magazine.