Lee Suk-Quin photographed in Toronto in August 2024.Galit Rodin/Globe and Mail
In a phone call, Sook-ying Lee apologizes for the “small detour” he took before settling on the MuchMusic axis. In an interview planned for her latest album, 72RHR, nostalgia returned to the conversation. But that’s the price of being one of those 1990s media personalities who never left people’s living rooms.
It’s been nearly 30 years since Lee first appeared on MuchMusic. To a generation of Canadians, she was a video jockey whose rough edges were easy to read. An underground punk experimenter, sexually fearless, it’s all over. She treated live television like performance art, toying with her presentation, ranging from flirtatious to confrontational in a limited few-minute segment.
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“It was a very, very, very special time,” she recalls.
These days, she’s in a quiet place.
Her new album is built around the idea of the resting heart rate, or 72 beats per minute when the human body is in equilibrium. It’s a title that gives you a sense of calm. However, Lee arrived at this concept through a meditation practice that he began at a particularly difficult time in his life.
“When people hear 72RHR, they immediately think it’s some kind of relaxing experience, but meditation isn’t like that,” she says. “Meditation is confronting chaos. It is trying to maintain balance through the most difficult and most sublime events.”
Lee describes his artistic ethos as “embracing the sounds of the world” and turning trash into something else, and that approach is evident on 72RHR. Sonically, the album is all about textures: field recordings, outdated technology, ambient experimentation, and static emotion.
She describes recording with “totally outdated video capabilities” and then removing the audio and completely reconstructing it.
“It’s like taking a lot of current technology, but also a lot of old technology, and creating this world where everything is accepted,” says Lee, who draws in part from his years of experience in radio.
She noticed that the recordings of local politicians “spouting nonsense” were slowed down, changing pitch and looping until the audio became strange. Elsewhere on the album, there are sounds from Kensington Market, an old keyboard, and a piece of PVC tubing he brought home from a construction site in Vancouver after noticing that it sounded like a trumpet when blown.
“It’s like a strange fractal, tiny microscopic filaments of sound interspersed throughout this album in a very unusual way,” Lee says.
This talent for creating something out of what the world has given her is at least partially responsible for her diverse career. After fleeing a strict and slowly disintegrating family, she became known to Vancouver’s anarchic DIY underground, MuchMusic viewers, CBC Radio listeners, and independent film fans.
As a child, she treated television, radio, and music as “escape portals” and would sing alone in her tiled basement shower because she loved the natural sounds of the room.
“I sang with my true heart,” she recalls.
This is a concept that surfaces many times throughout 72RHR. With a variety of tempos, textures, and entrances, Lee explores the idea that people are searching for truer versions of themselves. On “Monkey Mind,” she sings about someone becoming “a lawyer instead of a star-chasing dreamer.” This album is full of similar characters who are trying to make their own voices heard, who appeared before the world decided to hand them the script.
Lee himself had already found a way out of most norms when he was in his teens and early twenties. One of her earliest short films, The Escape of a Certain Mr. Noodle (1990), grew out of a job in which she roamed the streets of Vancouver wearing a giant egg noodle costume with her face hidden behind mesh. She spots a suit lying lifeless in the window of a deserted pasta bar and makes a choice.
“I immediately wanted to be that noodle,” she says. “I just take on a personality like a noodle wandering around in society.”
One day, Lee said, he wandered too far from the restaurant and was beaten by a group of skinheads on Granville Street. The foam pad did its job.
“That experience and that movie created a kind of correlation between being Chinese-Canadian and falling into this in-between world, and that noodle was also kind of in-between.”
For a long time, so was Lee. Her work has inspired a variety of intermediaries, including MuchMusic VJs, underground musicians, sexually fearless shortbus actors, CBC broadcasters, and Asian-Canadian filmmakers, who might mistake it for the big picture.
“People always wanted to put me in a box. Now you’re Asian. All you have to do is talk about your Asian identity.” Then came the “VJ Box,” then the Filmmaker Box, then the CBC Box. “It’s just easy to package. People have this concept.”
She describes the environment in which fear can harden and lead to self-censorship while operating within large organizations. “It’s not a service to the people to try to tie everything into a nice neoliberal pink ribbon,” says Lee, who once told the former head of CITY-TV that he can’t write scripts.
“I think I was really lucky that art saved my life. And most people are oppressed and they can’t express it, and that’s why they get sick. Our society tells them to keep quiet, and they get sick as a result of their oppression.”
Although the media has changed over the years, the question for Lee has always remained the same.
“Who are you and what is your song?”
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