Sui Zhen - Losing, Linda
Sui Zhen zooms in on the intersections between human life and technology - how to exist in the digital age, as well as the ways in which we risk losing true sight of ourselves in the process. Her latest chapter, Losing, Linda, pairs her signature inquisitveness with a surreal electronic pop that possesses a dreamlike quality: vivid, uncanny, and upon close examination, revealing of deep emotional and personal truths. It's an album that examines loss on multiple levels - from the death of our loved ones, to our widespread societal tendency to disappear within the ones and zeroes of modern life's tech-driven rush.
Losing, Linda's creation began back in 2016 when she took up an artistic residency in Sapporo, Japan. Zhen originally came to the residency equipped with demos conceived in the wake of her preceding breakout record, Secretly Susan - but real-life tradegy intervened, as her mother was diagnosed with cancer. In the process, a sense of overall mortality was unmistakably infused into the thematic structure of Losing, Linda.
On Losing, Linda, Sui Zhen takes the theoretical form of Linda, a digital doppelganger and avatar invoking the e-learning channel Lynda and its found Lynda Weinman, as well as the humanoid robot BINA48. The character of Linda is personified on the album's cover by choreographer and colleague Megan Payne, who literal embodiment of Linda interrogates the disembodiment of online life, and calls into question the possiblity of death in the digital age.
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