Sui Zhen

As far as DIY artists go, Becky Freeman a.k.a ‘Sui Zhen’, has been tinkering and tailoring her debut album for a couple of years now. She’s ready and determined to get her heart into swing and her teeth dug straight into the behind of the notorious music industry indefinite. While waiting patiently and biding her time among the ranks of the Red Bull Academy, Becky has curated and honed her skills as a musician and a performer. With her debut album ‘Two Seas’ just on the horizon only time will tell how her vessel will hold out.

So you were born in Sydney and moved to Melbourne?
Yeah I mean I’ve lived in Sydney for most of my life and then I moved to Melbourne just last year.

And Sui Zhen is your Chinese name?
Yeah It’s my middle name and basically my cousins and my siblings each have a name that have the Sui prefix. And mine is Sui Zhen and my sister is Sui Ann and so on. I decided to use mine for my music and art because otherwise, I don’t know what I’d use it for, it would just be sitting there in my passport unused.

I watched the stop motion of the new single ‘Little Frog’. I thought it was well made. So music isn’t your only interest, what other creative processes do you dabble in?
Filmmaking is a big interest of mine. I work as a creative producer part time for a channel that does documentaries on creative processes of other artists and designers. I’m really interested in documentary and filmmaking; so far I’m just doing that as a kind of a part time job, which is pretty tough, also, its quite an involved type of work.

So the new album Two Seas is out on the 4th of May, how has the production of the album progressed?
It has progressed a lot. I wrote the songs in 2009, I was tracking my own demos at home, I had a really nice mic and I was like – recording lots of guitar parts and different parts and then toward the end of the year I was sending those tracks to a producer who is from Australia, but he was based in Berlin at the time so we had this online collaboration where I was sending him all these tracks. They were kind of like ingredients, he was basically taking them and arranging them into like a… basically the traditional idea of what an arranger would be. As well as production parts and he was performing a bit on it too; his name is Tony Dupe. Then in 2010 I had the Red Bull Music Academy, followed by a whole load of travelling, which gave me a bit of perspective on certain songs and what I wanted the album to overall sound like. So I ended up re-tracking some vocals that year. By that time Tony had returned to Australia and rented out this really nice church in the south coast, New South Wales, where I was able to just sing, really nice with the natural reverb, just redo some of the vocals there and by the end of that year, 2011 that’s when it kind of finished up and that’s when I felt like it was a finished product, ready to start packaging up I guess.

Is it a concept album? Is there an overarching story, because Two Seas sounds like there’s something underneath…
It was a literal translation of Bahrain, which is where I spent some time in 2010 because my stepmother, my father’s second wife actually, is living there and working there, and I just spent two months with her. She’s family and she’s quite isolated out there and I was also isolating myself being there. I thought it was an appropriate name for the album because a lot of it came together with me moving to different spaces and relationships. And a lot of it was about the movement between home and a new place, just that travelling aspect between somewhere that was familiar and somewhere that’s really far which is kind of a big thing for a lot of the songs. Yeah I think that is the over arching theme, leaving familiar places or wanting to leave familiar places to experience something new or the adverse.

And also the same time that Two Seas is coming out you also have the E.P with your friend, Fox and Sui?
That was meant to come out before this album, it was meant to be out already in March, but basically we kind of got it vinyl pressed and the vinyl is getting pressed in the US and the guy that we are pressing it with has just gone AWOL. And we’ve been waiting for ages and we’ve just got the test pressing just recently after not hearing from him for a while and the whole kind of release was based around the vinyl E.P. We just really wanted to release it on vinyl and we’ve just been waiting for the actual product before we can now release it but its just been delayed so I guess that will come out after Two Seas now, so that’s just another fun project.

Do you think that working with collaborations and collectives furthers your knowledge and broadens your sound as a musician?
Yeah definitely I think before you can work in collectives and collaborations you really need to be comfortable in yourself. Because if your not, it can be just a little weird, if your not ready for it. If your ready to let someone else take the lead and just follow them or vice versa, be the one leading other people and collaborations, you compromise control but that doesn’t mean you have to compromise the quality.

How do you create and curate your sound?
Its quite intuitive; In the last few years I’ve become more refined in my music taste or I’ve become a lot more critical. I’ve tried hard to pick things that are going to influence me in the right way or really consider the music I’m listening to around the time I’m writing and make sure its what I want to be influenced by. So that means when I go to write music, I’m just pulling together these things that I’ve absorbed, throughout the music that I’ve been listening to as well as being inventive. I think its because I listen to different types of music across all genres, in my mind, I don’t break it up into different genres. I just think that’s a good songwriter or has an interesting voice.

Do you think that the line between different mediums has blurred, do you consider your self a musician or an artists?
Yeah it has blurred, I think it’s important to focus and not spread yourself to thin amongst too many different avenues, which I might have done previously and still do from time to time. I think I’d call myself a musician, but then sometimes I’m like ‘artist’ because I do visual art and film. Its coming from the same place, and the process is similar, but the industry around those mediums is different. Sometimes you don’t even have enough energy to really work on being a musician in the industry; that can be enough.

Watch the video for ‘Little Frog’ below:

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By Ash Moore