Taste Test Sui Zhen

THE FIRST ALBUM I BOUGHT
WITH MY OWN MONEY
There were actually two that I bought at the same time. One was called Pemba and it was a soundtrack to a documentary about Africa that I saw at IMAX. It was the first thing I ever saw at IMAX and I was wanting to recreate the experience at home, but it was different (laughs). It was like New Age White Man making ethnic music so it's kinda funny, but it was good. And I also bought Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morisette, because I listened to it a lot.

THE ALBUM I'M LOVING RIGHT NOW
I am loving Flamingo by Sean Nicholas Savage. He's an artist on the same label that Grimes is on, so he's kind of in that Montreal scene. He's a singer/songwriter that started writing quite traditional '60s- and '70s-inspired songs and then progressed into more like disco jazz and funny '80s pop music now, so he's gone through that whole trajectory and you can see that each album has had that natural progression that each artist goes through, starting with the basics, then fleshing out onto other genres and finally settling on something they really wanna make. So... I relate to it, but I really like his stuff because he's a bit weird as well. And he's really prolific; I get the feeling that he's really into his music making and just does it no matter what the reception is.

MY FAVOURITE PARTY ALBUM
I always like listening to Can, the German Krautrock band, and Future Days is an album that I really like by them. My types of parties are really chilled out, though. It's danceable; it's just a different kind of party.

MY FAVOURITE COMEDOWN ALBUM
I actually had a recent experience with this album. It's called Beautiful by The Reels. It goes in a few different directions; like there's a song that has a Japanese singer on it as well, and it's got romantic love songs, but then it's got poppy danceable songs too. It satisfies all the genres I like within that one album, so I feel like I can put it on and keep playing it and I don't need to think about choosing another album anytime soon because I'll just listen to that over and over again.

THE MOST SURPRISING RECORD
IN MY COLLECTION
I don't know if anything's a surprise with me. Maybe that I like house music, I like a lot of electronic music. I'm not embarrassed about any of the stuff I like; I listen to Beyonce sometimes too but I don't feel embarrassed about that. Okay, so there's this one that I kinda feel embarrassed [about] when it comes on and it's the artist Meredith Monk. Her music is kind of avant-garde and I can listen to it but other people find it grating and annoying, like “What the hell are you listening to?”

THE FIRST GIG I EVER ATTENDED
The first proper gig I went to was Beastie Boys and The Avalanches on the one lineup and it was one of the best things I ever saw.

THE WEIRDEST GIG EXPERIENCE
I'VE EVER HAD
I was like 16, at Big Day Out watching the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I remember my shoe came off. Everyone was like on a 45 degree angle, the crowd, and I could tell my shoe wasn't on any more and I was in this massive mosh-pit and no one could even move. Then someone held my shoe up three metres in front of me and I had to somehow get lifted up... it was just so awful and wrong! So I got lifted up and had to crowd surf over to get it and obviously couldn't get down so people just crowd surf you out of the crowd... you end up at security and just have to leave. But I prefer that, it's so dangerous!

THE BIGGEST NON-MUSICAL INFLUENCES ON ME
I guess, film. I love cinema and I watch a lot of movies, but I also love the animal kingdom. If I learn about a certain habit that an animal has, I like to imagine a story around that, which is kind of anthropomorphising the animal, but that's what I do.

THE COOLEST PERSON I'VE EVER MET
One of the coolest people I ever met was at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona in 2010. I kind of adamantly play guitar and sing as a main thing, so even if I might loop stuff in my recording or use more production and electronics and that kind of stuff, I still like to perform quite simply. But I was performing at this festival that was all about innovation in music technology and doing interesting things with all your little midi controllers or computer software, you know, processing sound in interesting ways, and I was playing guitar and singing and I felt so out of place. It was fine, it went well but I was really emotional that I got through it all and I walked off stage and Moodymann was there, because he was playing on the same stage as me. He's like super big, super popular in this other scene that's not directly connected to my kind of music, and he was like this big black guy drinking straight whisky, sitting in a chair with this woman behind him – one of his many ladies – and he was like, “Come here!” and gave me this huge hug and a pep talk: “You just keep doing what you're doing!” It made me feel really good because he gave me a hug and I really needed a hug, from anyone, so the fact that it was this person that I really respect and he was just recognising that I was having a moment, I was pretty happy about that.

THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY CRUSH
I'VE EVER HAD
I constantly have celebrity crushes. I'm obsessed with Natalie Portman and I'm watching all her films that she did when she was younger. I think Natalie Portman's a really smart kind of celebrity; she took time off acting to go back to uni, and as well as blockbuster films she's done other interesting roles. I wanna be her friend.

IF I COULD HANG OUT IN ANY
TIME AND PLACE IN HISTORY
I would like to see what it would've been like for my family. My maternal background is Malaysian Chinese and my grandma's heritage goes back to the traditional tribes from Borneo, and her tribe was like a headhunting tribe (Iban is the name) so I'd love to know what that would've been like, to be a part of that, and feel pretty cool that that's part of my heritage. But that might mean I'd have to kill people, but I don't think so, maybe because I'm a woman! If you're part of this tribe, you have a particular type of tattoo – and it's not like the typical tribal tattoo, it's actually quite an interesting design – and I actually have a tattoo of that. If you were part of that tribe, you'd get that tattoo when you killed someone; it'd mark how many heads you had taken.

IF I WASN'T MAKING MUSIC
I'd be a marine biologist maybe and try to discover some new kind of sea creatures that nobody knows about. I wish! Actually I was looking at some marine biology courses and I was like, 'Stick with music, Becky, just stick with music!'