[ FREQ ] Sonic Resistance : A Chat With Its Creators

It's rare to find a manga where the music actually feels present on the page. When I think about music manga, the first thing that comes to mind is Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, the amazing story by Harold Sakuishi. One of the coolest band mangas out there, but the emotion during its musical scenes never hit quite as hard as it did in the anime, where the music was actually playing, something that's notoriously hard to translate onto paper. FREQ is different. From the linework to the physiognomy of its characters, every panel where sound is involved, you can almost feel it, or imagine it in your head.

FREQ is an independent seinen manga fusing electronic music history with political sci-fi worldbuilding. We had the pleasure to chat with its creator, Nicola Kazimir, and illustrator GoodNewsforBadGuys, ahead of the physical release of Volume 01 and the project's upcoming celebration in Tokyo. Dai Sato, one of anime's most legendary scriptwriters (Cowboy Bebop, Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex), is also a co-writer and core team member, making this a genuinely unique crew to have behind a single project, even though he wasn't on this call.

Let's start with you, Nicola. You're a DJ, a curator, an artist, and now a manga creator. How did this project actually come together? The post that made me want to ask you this is one of your first ever on Instagram, from 2017, an obscure manga you'd shared right after your first trip to Japan. So I know a lot of this has been building for a while.

NK: That post is actually funny, because that was me at the height of my life as an international DJ, my first time in Japan. I was just posting impressions, and I remember having this real realization that my music had brought me to Japan. That was always my dream. I grew up mostly on Japanese game culture, honestly since childhood, my earliest memory is gaming. Anime came a bit later, when I was in school.  But the project itself came from an accumulation of things, DJing, being a curator of an off-space, producing, and being genuinely obsessed with electronic music history and how genres historically/politically connect to each other.

Mizuho Zoshi Vol. 2 by Kazuichi Hanawa

Around 2019, with money we'd made from illegal raves, we put together a Drexciya exhibition at Mikro Zürich. Drexciya is a non-linear, Afrofuturist sonic project from two artists who never showed their faces publicly until one of them died, told across a lot of releases. The story is conveyed through samples and information on the cover, such as track names or drawings. It's kind of like the storytelling in Elden Ring. It's fragmented; you aren't led, but you are incentivized to actively discover.. For that exhibition, we worked with an artist named Abu Qadim Haqq, who had previously done an album cover for Drexciya and separately released a comic, and Dai Sato helped him write its dialogue.

The Book of Drexciya Vol. 1

That's actually how the connection to Dai was made.  Later, I had the idea for FREQ, pulled from my curatorial work, my love of Japanese subcultures, and my political and aesthetic references. I wrote a small pitch text incl. Moodboard and asked for a meeting. Weeks later I was in an online-meeting with Dai and his translator. He didn't smile much at first, I think he was skeptical, just listening. But after about 40-45 minutes he realized I knew what I was talking about, and he felt a musical connection too, since Dai himself was a passionate DJ and had run the first techno label in Japan, called Frogman.

How did the team end up as just the three of you?

NK: At the start, the team we had didn't work out. Around that time I was following a Japanese illustration archive account, and the account owner did a Q&A on their story where someone asked who their favorite illustrator was. The answer was Good News for Bad Guys. I cold-messaged him out of the blue, "hey, you want to jump into a manga about electronic music, Dai Sato's also on board."

What was that message like to receive?

GNFBG: Honestly, I read it about ten times. I remember exactly where I was, visiting my mom, and she noticed my face change while I was reading it. What made it hit even harder is that I realized this was the same person who had ordered a copy of Speed Biscuits, a zine I'd made with my girlfriend under our project Bonus Duo, a comic about two girls going to a rave during COVID. That was a real full-circle moment.  After that we started meeting regularly, getting to know each other. About six months later I moved to Zurich for what became a two-year, incredibly intense art residency, drawing, but also going to clubs constantly, hearing new music. Nicola's scene, the EBM side of it specifically, felt cinematic to me, not trend-chasing, just genuinely authentic. Volume 0 of FREQ, the club scene chapter, is honestly an homage to exactly that period.

Spread of Speed Biscuits.

Is FREQ for everyone?

NK: Honestly, no, and I don't think it's trying to be. For us, the most important thing is telling a good story. Electronic music is inherently political, techno's origins in Detroit are Black-rooted, and a lot of the anime creators we admire, if you look at Eureka Seven or Cowboy Bebop, were themselves huge Detroit techno fans, Morimoto included, not just Dai. We want to activate people, whether they come in through anime and manga and discover sounds they've never heard, or they come in through electronic music and discover political history they didn't know. The Electribe, for example, is a direct one-to-one reference to the UK's Spiral Tribe free party movement. After that movement/collective was persecuted, the static, "watch the DJ, film everything, don't move" club culture we know today emerged, a direct result of 1994 UK laws that criminalized rave gatherings. All of that is the base of the manga and depicted cryptically.

Can you explain the sonic spatial segregation concept in the story?

NK: Cities like Detroit and Chicago were racially and economically segregated. For our story we created a concept called spatial sonic segregation inspired by high frequency emitters that are placed within financial districts to keep the youth away. The suburbs and industrial districts are the loudest, where the actual Frequency energy gets produced. The leisure city, where the elite live, is silent, but that silence is expensive, it's maintained through noise-cancelling technology gated by your citizen score. If you're poor and you try to enter without that access, you can take real physical damage. It's segregation, just recoded through sound and geography.

How long did the worldbuilding take before you started actually scripting?

NK: About two years, and honestly, that was the fun part. Figuring out transport, labor, education, religion, the map, the timeline structure, that's where I'm most active. The story itself references multiple timelines: the 1920s, when synthesizers were still an academic curiosity, the late '70s and '80s when electronic music got commercialized, and the present, where major labels and streaming have hollowed out how musicians actually get paid. There's also a character, Dr. Hanon Kins, the founder of FREQ technology, tied to an earlier timeline, plus childhood flashbacks explaining how our protagonist, Akai, ended up joining the Electribe in the first place. So, there is an X-axis for geography and a Y-axis for time, which gamifies the storytelling and opens up numerous plots and possibilities. 

Dr. Hanon Kins

When does something become set in stone?

NK: Once a volume is final, we don't retcon. You lock in your character names and world mechanics during the scripting stage, and maintain that consistency throughout. It's less scary or relieving than it sounds, it's just how the process has to function, otherwise you fall into the lazy trap of inventing multiple universes or time machines just to undo a choice you regret. There's a pretty major decision, involving a character death, that's already been quietly teased, but will we execute on those leads? Who knows.

The community around this project is very active, on Discord and across social media. Has that influenced your work at all?

NK: Genuinely, yes. People can't influence the core storyline, but they can contribute details, weaponry, props and even whole side characters. The first community-designed item is already going into the upcoming volume, a piece of weaponry submitted through our Discord. We ran an open call asking for sonically-inspired weapon ideas for one of the police factions, got around 15 submissions, all genuinely strong, and more will show up in future chapters.

Freq Volume 1 panel. 

What's the actual business reality of an independent project like this?

NK: It's a lot like electronic music in that way, sometimes it's not about being the most qualitative product, it's about networking, about the right editor having a soft spot for what you're doing. We've talked to some publishers. Some passed entirely. Others told us straight up: "we love everything about it, but we don't know how we'd sell it." We also had a real shot at Japanese distribution, a music and book distributor that would have put us in around 60 stores across Tokyo and Osaka. That business scaled down before it happened, we were unlucky there.

Since FREQ is bilingual already, the next languages we want are German, Italian, and French, alongside stronger distribution in the US, where about 70% of our customers already are. Japan is still the one that would mean the most to us. We're hopeful we can reignite that someday.

Does staying independent shape the kind of story you're able to tell?

GNFBG: Completely. Even if we never land a bigger deal, I think we'd still get real satisfaction just from finishing what's been written and illustrating it start to finish. This project has a distinctive identity, and it might not fit neatly into what the manga market usually rewards, a lot of what gets published leans on constant reprints and known formulas. I think people sometimes wonder who's really into electronic music in this specific way, and that makes some of the market hesitant.

There's a story Katsuhiro Otomo told in an interview with Naoki Urasawa, that his best work came from pulling references from completely outside the manga industry itself. That's something we hold onto. If you're European and you try to mimic something Japanese, long-term, that's a trap you might not get out of. When we finished the first issue, Dai Sato looked at it and told me I hadn't tried to draw like a Japanese mangaka. Even with pieces of that influence still in there, it was more about blending with what FREQ actually is at its core. That was a real starting point for me.

Freq Volume 0 panel.

NK: At the end of the day, it's genuinely nice to hold a high-quality product you put real time into. I didn't make music to please a specific demographic, it's the drive of finishing something and putting it into the world, knowing at least one person out there will resonate with it. I think what we're doing, is second to none. You feel it when a product's been thought through carefully.

GNFBG: And that independence guarantees freedom, which all three of us care about a lot. It's a little political too, actually a lot like the Electribe in our own lore. They know how to produce their own energy, and that's exactly why they're outlaws, hunted by the people who'd rather they stay dependent on the system instead.

If you could tell people "if you love X, you'll love FREQ," what would X be?

NK: Aphex Twin. Not because he's my personal favorite, but because he might be the biggest example of genuinely complex, niche electronic music becoming something close to mainstream. At one point he had more plays than Taylor Swift. If you know him and love him, you'll love FREQ.

GNFBG: For me, It’s Koji Morimoto’s work, and the way that whole genre used music videos to actually experiment. If you love that, you'll love FREQ. “Extra’’, the video he animated for Ken Ishii, is a perfect example,the animation and the music are so perfectly blended you can't pull them apart.

If you love that, and Chris Cunningham's music videos too, Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker," Madonna's "Frozen," you'll get exactly where we're coming from. A lot of my earliest references for this project come from that vein where animation and electronic music blended directly, Wamdue Project's "King of My Castle" actually used Ghost in the Shell frames to animate the song. That whole legacy is baked into FREQ. One of the first books I ever ordered from Japan, at 19, was Orange, Morimoto's only solo art book. And years later, FREQ Records actually released music with Ken Ishii himself, the same artist "Extra" was made for. A real full-circle moment. 

Go check out the FREQ website at freq.industries for the latest news, releases, and their shop.