Susan Dietrich, aka Suzy Soundz, aka The Space Lady, is an outsider artist and street musician. Starting out in the early ’70s with a beat up junk shop accordion, Dietrich took to the streets of Boston with a hatful of simple tunes, literally singing for her supper. Crowds were drawn to the eccentric lady with her broken squeezebox, clad in twinkling lights and viking hat. Arming herself with a keyboard and effects pedals, Dietrich relocated to San Francisco where her enchantingly peculiar talents made her one of the city’s most treasured buskers.
Dietrich’s fragile, tone-pure voice and delicate enunciation seem ready made for a twee ’60s folk accompaniment. Instead her vocals get miked through an echo unit, soaring like vapour trails high above the soft bleeps of her prehistoric Casio. The Space Lady is Vashti Bunyan swallowed up by a Tron-esque digiverse. She’s a lost flowerchild abducted by gentle spacemen, her songs anodyne postcards tumbling across the black void.
