Deqn Sue is an American alternative pop artist with a sharp edge bursting with message and humour. She has been featured on NPR Tiny Desk and in Netflix original series, Orange is the New Black but is still relatively unknown outside of the US. Spending most of her time between Huntsville, Alabama and L.A. here is a refreshing songmaker whose quick lyrical and sonic turns create constant surprise without ever missing a beat. With hints of Funk, R&B, pop and even vaudeville and EDM, she transcends style, spinning words and sounds and is purely engaged in the now.

Let's start with her name: an amalgam of the character name that her father Rod Perry made famous on the hit 1970s TV series S.W.A.T. - Sgt. David "Deacon" Kay - and her mother's first name. DeQn Sue describes her music as socially conscious, alternative pop. A good description, knowing that her influences are Chaka Khan, David Bowie, Queen and visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. "I want to make music that lasts," DeQn Sue says. "Music that you will think about for years to come."

With her new album Juggernaut on the horizon this will evidently come to pass. Having come up through singing in church it’s easy to hear tones of Beyonce and Kelis but her kitsch tastes in avant garde art and poetry from the likes of William Ernest Henley and the aforementioned Basquiat and a distaste for x-rated sexscapades through song keep this artist among only a handful of unique, yet ambitious and effortlessly talented pop stars out there.

Qualia is a quandary, a question mark and maybe, just maybe, his finest release in years. It's also a record best defined in the words of Andrew Weatherall himself: "Mr Brackstone, my psychic shepherd, when confronted by the facts would probably say it was cosmic synchronicity but then again he would because he's Jung at heart. Others may cite mere coincidence. These are the facts. I'll leave the metaphysical debate for another time...

It's all about the black notebooks as memorial device and "The Black Notebook" and "This Is Memorial Device". At the same time as reading Mr Modiano and Mr Keenan I was ensconced in the Woodleigh Research Facility investigating a method of composition sparked by a random event too prosaic for the telling; unless of course we go back to "The Red Book" and see the hand of Jah [the D.M.T molecule that steers human existence] at work.

After all it was him/her/non-binary that sent me the "shave your beard off" message. And the "don't buy any more drugs" one. Whatever your leanings the music on "Qualia" is the result of images, feelings and thought processes stirred up by Monsieur Modiano and Mister Keenan channelled through the medium of a sonic notebook - in itself the memoir of somebody else's life/fiction. My own black notebooks, like Jean's [Modiano's protagonist] stir the silt of memory and birth as many mysteries as memories. They also provided the track titles."

Qualia Tracklisting

1. Evidence The Enemy

2. Darktown Figures

3. Spreads A Haze (And A Glory)

4. Saturday International

5. Between Stations

6. Soft Estates

7. Selling The Shadow

8. Vorfreude 2