Sui Zhen

She is never wearing shoes, but always wearing socks. Even by the pool. Plain socks. Are they a clue to decipher all the pastel-coloured bizarre banality of her promotional films?

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” she says. “It’s like a little thing. A misplaced detail. I’m also really into socks. I’m always like, ‘What socks shall I wear today?’ I have equal amount of socks to everything else. I have two big drawers of socks. I have heaps of socks. Also, people know that they can ask me when they’ve run out of socks. I’ve got every kind of sock and I don’t even like patterned socks. I’m very specific.”

Sui Zhen is a Chinese-Malaysian name (given to her by her grandfather) and the middle names of Melbourne-based artist Becky Freeman. Performing under both her birth monikers, as well as DJ Susan and in various lineups including Sui Et Sui, Fox + Sui, Andrew & Rebecca and NO ZU, last year as Sui Zhen she released two EPs on cassette tape – Female Basic and Body Reset – through Tokyo-based labels. She now has a new guise and a new album, Secretly Susan. It’s Susan who is the besocked protagonist of Freeman’s surreal videos.

“It is an alter ego,” explains Freeman, who wears a blonde wig and blue contact lenses when playing the role. “Susan actually started before any of the visuals, in the mixing phase. I was listening back to the songs and trying to find a link – I was just listing girls’ names. I wrote a synopsis for her, like, ‘Susan lives in a post-apocalyptic world and there’s no water left on the planet and it’s all pink’ – this sci-fi thing.”

Susan introduces herself in ‘Take It All Back’, her hand posed self-consciously on cheek as if in an awkward dating video: “Hi. My name’s Susan. I love the water. Sunrise. Sunset.” The character developed as Freeman worked on the album’s visual elements, which she takes full control of.

“I can see things audio-visually often. It’s another component of the music,” she says. “It’s so specific now that if somebody else were to do it, it wouldn’t be quite right.

“Susan emerged. She’s an amalgamation of how people might represent themselves in their digital documentation. It was a way of characterising that. The more time I had, the deeper I went into crafting this person. In the visual media, I definitely take on her role. It’s nice to have a limitation to work within. It gives you a direction. It’s more defined in terms of what belongs and what doesn’t belong.”

Although Freeman is often in disguise in her self-produced and directed output, the songs on Secretly Susan come from the ‘real’ her. Taking influences from Japanese lovers rock, ’80s electro/bossa nova and dubby lounge music, it is laced with danceable beats and tropical, poolside pop.

“The songs relate to specific things to me personally,” she says. “This album is more about experiences from my life and different events that have happened. It’s more emotional in that sense. Though I didn’t always realise. You might be using your art form to process some emotional thing that you’re not actually aware of. Later you listen back and you’re like, ‘Holy crap, I was totally singing about that!’”

As for the socks, they’re more than just an eccentric passion. In the uncanny and confusing dystopia of Sui Zhen’s ‘Infinity Street’ and ‘Take It All Back’ videos, one can’t help but try to find meaning and make metaphors. The socks must have significance. They are the owls in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The carpet pattern in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

“I feel like it’s quite representative of a lot of things I do, because I really like really simple pleasures and really enjoying them,” she explains. “There’s this not-scientifically-proven condition that people claim to have – it’s a bit of a fetish, and it’s one of the influences on the videos. It follows this idea of people speaking really softly and talking about everything they’re doing and tapping on things and making sounds. Like when you go to the doctor’s and they talk through the process: ‘I’m just going to bring my hand up here and it’s going to be a little bit cold.’ You feel calm because you know what to expect. You feel like things are under control. But it can make you hypersensitive. People are said to get this tingly rush.

“It leads back to the sock thing. I feel I’m labouring on, but it’s the smallest, minutest part of your day. For me, there’s nothing better than a fresh pair of socks. You put them on and you’re like, ‘I feel ready.’”