Sui Zhen and Rainbow Chan double single launch

If you like your music honest and  inventive, then you'd do well to check out Sui Zhen (Melbourne) and Rainbow Chan (Sydney), who are teaming up to launch their respective singles from forthcoming albums. Sui Zhen's Little Frog takes a sideways look at her folk and country influences placing her somewhere between Joanna Newsom and PJ Harvey with stark and intricate arrangements produced by Tony Dupe (Holly Throsby, Jack Ladder). After her self-titled debut EP in 2007, Sui Zhen has earned a reputation for compelling, down-to-earth performances, supporting international acts such as Coco Rosie, our old mate Kimya Dawson, The Brunettes, and miserablist genius Malcolm Middleton. Little Frog is Sui Zhen's first release since returning from prestigious Red Bull Music Academy in London, 2010, and she will be accompanied by a live band for these special shows.

Rainbow Chan's Sweet Tooth is a sensual collage of strange and dreamy vocals and skittering electronic samples produced by the lady herself in her bedroom studio. Classically trained in saxophone, piano and choral music and fresh from playing at the Iceland Airwaves Festival thanks to FBi's Northern Lights Competition, Rainbow uses the darkest of beats, field recordings and a beguiling vocal delivery to craft intricate left-field pop songs. An impressive one-woman show, her live set includes a cover of The Cardigans' Lovefool.

Watch Sui Zhen's handmade music video here  and Watch Rainbow Chan covered in 16L of melting ice cream in her wonderfully weird video for Sweet Tooth here.

SUI ZHEN AND RAINBOW CHAN - DOUBLE SINGLE LAUNCH
JAN 19, THE GRACE DARLING, MELBOURNE
JAN 20, FBi SOCIAL, SYDNEY

Fox + Sui interview

The wonderfully talented writer Jess O'Callaghan has recently joined Team Bobbysix. Here's her first interview:

Becky Freeman, half of Melbourne-based duo Fox + Sui, speaks just like she sings. Everything is wonderfully dreamy, and she doesn’t seem to find the intercontinental evolution of their debut EP nearly as astounding as I do. "Andy would make the music and send it to me wherever I was in the world and I would use Garage Band and sing over it." Where was she, when she was putting lyrics to Andras Fox’s already mesmerising music? "All over. San Francisco, London...Bahrain."

Becky (or Sui Zhen, as she is known when she is creating amazing songs like this one) and Melbourne beat-maker Andras Fox met at the Red Bull Music Academy in London. She calls the experience a "life-changing kind of thing. All expenses paid, access to all the equipment... They take every care out of you apart from making music." With every other care relegated to the real world, the only two Australians in the RBMA semester began to make brilliant music together.

Drawn together by speaking the same language and a love of psychedelic garage style music by James Pants, Becky and Andras began to produce demos and become friends. Fox + Sui combines Becky’s tinkling voice and dream-like lyrics with Andras’s talent for mixing garage house, and what comes out is somewhere between lounge, exotica and dreamy pop. "For the next six or seven months I was travelling around and Andy would send me instrumental tracks... He would be using obscure sampling, and making them in a really analogue way and I would just use the microphone on my laptop."

Does the influence of where she was show in the music they made? Becky thinks it’s inevitable, although don’t expect lyrics about Bahrain to be leaping out of the ether. The mystical quality of the music they make means that they could get away with their unique recording techniques, and create something incredible. And when they’re not travelling the world, playing psychedelic festivals and collecting records? Becky creates some beautifully homemade music videos. I ask about my favourite - the addictive stop-motion clip for her solo work as Sui Zhen Little Frog. "I’m glad that I did it," she says with a laugh, although admits it took a long time. "Actually, not a long time, a couple of weeks, but I didn’t edit it until a long time later."

With their EP to be released in early 2012, Fox + Sui are busy playing around Melbourne, including the Buffalo Club and Worker’s Club. They will play at the Sugar Mountain Festival on the 14th of January at The Forum Theatre, Melbourne. Apparently we can expect psychedelic muumuus. As if we need convincing.

Interview by Jess O'Callaghan. Find out more about Fox and Sui at their facebook page.