Unplugged Lounge Conversations with SUUNCAAT

For SUUNCAAT, music is less about fitting neatly into a genre and more about building an entire world. Rooted in classical violin, shaped by punk, electronic music, pop, noise, film, literature and visual art, the project brings together seemingly disparate influences to create something entirely its own. At the centre of it all is a fascination with symbolism, mythology, technology and the ways personal experiences can be transformed into something universal. With the release of her brand-new single “work,” SUUNCAAT explores discipline, absurdity, agency and the strange power that can come from carrying your own weight. In conversation with Sonic Sisters, she takes us through her unconventional path into music, the women who have inspired her, the philosophy behind “work,” her deeply personal track “signs,” and her ambitions to expand SUUNCAAT into something that exists far beyond music. From Tchaikovsky and Madonna to Hegel and the master-slave dialectic, this is an artist with no interest in simplifying the world she’s creating, and no intention of asking her audience to either.

Thanks for chatting with us at Sonic Sisters Magazine! Can you share a bit about how your journey into music began?

I started with classical violin when I was really young. I don’t think that’s a good thing but I could read a music sheet before I could read a book. As a preteen, I found an old dusty guitar in my attic and started picking it up and began writing my first songs. Not long after that, I stumbled upon Reason on some weird music forums online, and that completely changed the trajectory for me. I started producing, became obsessed with hardware and synthesis, and taught myself how sound actually works. I went through punk, experimental music, electronic music, pop, and a lot of different projects before realizing I didn’t really need to choose between any of them. SUUNCAAT eventually became the place where everything could coexist.

Who have been some of the most significant influences on your musical style?

I don’t think individual music artists have influenced my style that directly. It was always more of a collision of things: Top 40 radio in the background at home, punk rock and post-rock leaking through my sisters’ bedroom doors, and noise, so much noise everywhere. Movies, video games, literature and classical music probably shaped me just as much as contemporary music did. Tchaikovsky was hugely important to me. I think I absorbed atmosphere, tension, melody, character and world-building from all kinds of places before I thought consciously about style. Some of the poets, musicians, filmmakers and visual artists who specifically moved me or set a precedent for me are Yousuke Yukimatsu, Marilyn Manson, Akira Kurosawa, Madonna, Aphex Twin, M.C. Escher and Aleister Crowley. They all showed me different ways an artist could build a language and a world around themselves.

And which female musicians or women in the music industry have inspired your journey?

There are so many, and usually for very different reasons. Madonna was really important to me because of the scale of her reinvention and how completely she understood the relationship between music, image and culture. Kate Bush for the theatricality and total commitment to her own internal logic. Laurie Anderson really resonates with me because she came from violin but treated music, electronics, performance, technology and visual art as one practice rather than separate disciplines. I’m also fascinated by some of the women who were there very early in electronic music, like Delia Derbyshire and Suzanne Ciani. They were building electronic sonic languages before there was much of a roadmap for it. Nancy Sinatra has always had this incredibly specific presence that I love, and Vanessa-Mae was important to me when I was younger simply because I was a violinist seeing another woman take that instrument completely outside of the environment where I had been taught it belonged.

How do your personal experiences shape your songwriting, and what do you hope listeners take away from those connections?

Pretty much everything starts with something I’ve actually felt, observed, or lived through, but I rarely want to describe it literally. I like to transform personal experiences into symbols, characters, environments and archetypes. I think symbolism turns individual stories into universal ones. Archetypes are powerful because they already exist somewhere, and they can hold a lot of different experiences at once. The more people are able to project their own meaning onto a symbol, the more powerful that symbol becomes. So, I don’t necessarily want listeners to understand the exact event that inspired a song. I want them to recognize the emotional structure of it, attach their own experiences to it, and make it theirs, so it can live forever. 

Congratulations on your brand-new single “work,” what inspired this particular song?

Thank you! “work” started with thinking about the old Camus’ take on the myth of Sisyphus, in relation to my own experience with contemplating the absurdity of non-rewarding work. What interested me was the dignity of seeing the work as the finality in itself. I had also been reading too much of Hegel lately and got a bit obsessed with the master-slave dialectic and the idea that work produces consciousness. The person who confronts material reality, transforms it, and endures resistance develops a relationship to themselves that the person simply consuming the result never has. So “work” is really not a song about burnout. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s about the way discipline can create agency. A lot of it came from the frustration of feeling like I was constantly pulling other people’s weight while listening to them explain why they couldn’t move. Meanwhile, I was getting up every day and doing the work regardless of how difficult my own circumstances felt. At some point that frustration became almost empowering. You realize that the person carrying the weight is also the person becoming stronger through carrying it. There’s a kind of freedom in refusing to organize your life around immediate pleasure and instead choosing what you’re willing to build, repeat, and endure. You start shaping your own existence through the act of doing. In the SUUNCAAT-verse, that weight became an entity. It doesn’t have a name; it can’t be named. It’s an invisible parasite that latches onto people and weighs them down. You can’t necessarily destroy it or communicate with it, but you can decide what relationship you have to its weight, and what kind of person you become in response to it. That’s really the core of the song for me: the world can be absurd and unfair, but you can still choose to become the best version of yourself you can be. 

What song (not your own) has had the biggest influence on you and why?

Probably Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The first time I ever heard it was actually as an 8-bit rendition in the Nintendo game City Connection. I was really young and had no idea what the piece was, but the melodies completely moved me. It actually took years before I heard a full orchestral rendition of it, but by then, the melodies were already super familiar to me. It felt like I was rediscovering something I had known intuitively for years. There is so much nuance in it, and it was one of the first times I really understood that melody is a language in itself, more precise than words.

Is there a song in your catalog that holds a special personal meaning for you? We'd love to hear the story or inspiration behind it.

“signs” probably holds the most personal meaning for me. It feels like a coming-of-age track, but also like an exorcism and a dialogue with G-d at the same time.

It’s also one of the rare moments where I let people see a bit of my secret understanding of how the world works. There are coded phrases in it, little benedictions, private symbols and ideas. In that sense, it’s basically a charade. It’s also the most complete piece I’ve made so far, both musically and visually. The sound, imagery, symbols, and emotional narrative all feel inseparable.

What are some of the aspirations you have for your music moving forward?

I have to keep expanding SUUNCAAT until it feels like a world you can physically enter. Bigger live shows, more elaborate characters and sets, films, books, technology, collaborations, whatever medium makes sense for a particular idea. Touring is also extremely important to me. We just did our first shows in Japan, which was surreal, and I want to keep bringing the project to places where people are open to the universe we share. Even though there are only two of us on stage, I’ve built the show with bigger spaces in mind, so I’m really excited to see how it goes next festival season. But ultimately, I just want to see how far I can take this thing without simplifying it.

What advice would you give to emerging female artists who are just starting out in the music world?

Develop your taste before you develop your strategy. There are a million people waiting to tell a young artist what she should sound like, look like, post, wear, release, and become. If you don’t have a really strong sense of self, it’s easy to become an accumulation of other people’s suggestions. Never follow trends, never try to be, sound, or look like someone else. Technical skills can and should be learned. You can and should learn production, editing, directing, business, whatever you need. But taste is harder. 

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

Thank you for taking the time to enter my world. I think we’re living through a moment where there’s enormous pressure to make everything instantly understandable, marketable, and easy to categorize. I hope people keep seeking out art that confuses them and unsettles them a little, so culture can keep growing. 

https://youtu.be/Jt0jBTaUAtg?si=GDbG6bInDEVaUZnd 

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