Becky Sui Zhen Freeman is a musician, songwriter, producer and interdisciplinary artist working across sound, moving image, performance, digital media and writing. As Sui Zhen, she makes music in the slippery spaces between inner and outer life: where identities are made and performed, memory persists, bodies carry loss and technology reshapes our connections to one another.

Sui Zhen’s music moves between dreamlike electronic pop, dub, lounge and bossa nova-inflected songwriting. Her early releases – including Sui Zhen (2007), Two Seas (2012), Body Reset and Female Basic (2014) – established a fascination with where pop music, fiction and lived experience overlap. Secretly Susan (2015) gave that impulse a persona, using ‘Susan’ to explore the construction and performance of identity and womanhood online. Losing, Linda (2019) followed with another meticulously realised character and world, turning towards death, memory and the strange afterlives of digital ephemera. After losing her mother in 2018, those ideas had become unavoidably personal.

Collaboration is central to Freeman’s practice, from musical partnerships and label compilations to work across performance, art, technology and experience design. Her live practice moves through solo electronic performance to ensemble and improvisation, while her NTS radio show and work as a music supervisor extend Freeman’s restless inquiry into new forms.

After the sudden loss of her three-day-old son in 2021, Freeman found music extraordinarily difficult to contend with. Slowly, she returned through loose, searching jams with Phil Stroud, Adam Halliwell, Josh Smeltink and Jack Doepel. Their jazz-trained approach informed Witness (2026), an album that has no persona or elaborate world to inhabit. Rather than working towards a particular concept, Freeman was making music as a means of psychological and emotional survival, at a time when getting through the day could feel like a creative act in itself.

The result is perhaps her most exposed musical output yet – freer in form, more improvisatory in spirit and imbued with the hard-won fulfilment of being able to create once more.