Watch Sui Zhen's Video 'Matsudo City Life'

Melbourne-based avant-pop singer and producer Becky Sui Zhen last visited Aotearoa in 2016 for a superb trio of events, and is currently attracting a considerable amount of international attention in the leadup to her new album Losing, Linda, releasing this Friday. The multi-media artist regularly tackles issues surrounding identity via invented personas, with the record's title referring to a character Sui Zhen devised following her mother's diagnoses with cancer in 2016 – described as "a digital doppelgänger and avatar invoking the e-learning channel Lynda and its founder Lynda Weinman, as well as the humanoid robot BINA48" (she also played a character named Linda in rib-tickling online video series The Melbourne Coffee Show). In Sui Zhen's self-directed video for 'Matsudo City Life', she interacts with eerily mask-wearing duplicates in gorgeously-filmed locations in Australia and Japan. The artist reflected on the inspirations for her hyperreal latest single, drawing on her experiences participating in a residency in Sapporo, Japan...

"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 romanticized 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."

'Losing, Linda' is out on Friday 27th September via Cascine (NA) and Dot Dash (AU/NZ).