Simon Frank - VICTIM OF A NEW AGE (2025)

- From Shanghai, post-punk electro where outsider pop meets dance, poised between old-school and future-oriented styles. -

Mars89’s label Nocturnal Technology presents VICTIM OF A NEW AGE, a new wave and EBM-style album by Shanghai-based Canadian producer Simon Frank. Sneering vocals straight from the minimal synth songbook are paired with acidic basslines, warped breakbeats, and swirling dub echoes, creating an album that, while maintaining an old-school, analog-like atmosphere throughout, is also resolutely forward-looking.

Below is a message from the artist.

A few months after releasing my previous album in the summer of 2021, I bought an Elektron Digitakt sampler. After making music with fairly limited equipment for a while, I wanted to see how I could experiment with samples and less straightforward structures. Things took a while, in part because I moved from Beijing to Shanghai, and in part because Covid made life in China in 2022 a bit unstable, but eventually I learned how to use the new sampler to play and process breakbeats. This opened up new possibilities for me, and I found myself thinking about two albums where new technology helped industrial and punk mutate into something softer and funkier: Bourbonese Qualk’s My Government Is My Soul and Flux’s Uncarved Block. When I heard the Bourbonese Qualk album for the first time I was surprised how something so underground recalled some of the first electronic music I encountered as a kid—Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers. I wanted to make something with a similar energy: weird yet infectious, and unafraid of being a little earnest.

I generally write songs at home, then perform them live to see what works, what doesn’t, and what little details might emerge through improvisation. I refined all the songs on the album by playing shows, both at rock venues and dance music clubs.

Even when the kick drum is four-to-the-floor, I’ve tried to use percussion, samples, and synth lines to bring a sense of movement or deceptive complexity to the rhythms. As I made the more breakbeat-driven or slower songs, I was thinking about vague memories of music I heard as a kid in the 90s, not only the mainstream artists mentioned above, but also stuff like projects by Bill Laswell (who my dad listened to a lot at the time), along with more recent discoveries for me like Scorn and Techno Animal. I wrote “Premonition” after walking around a Ming Dynasty tomb near my apartment on a very foggy afternoon, which might explain its gothy sound. I really like how “Pass” suggests some kind of proto dubstep, which wasn’t necessarily my intention when I started writing it.

Though Shanghai is in many ways a more comfortable place than Beijing, it is relentlessly commercial. As I wrote some of the lyrics I was thinking about what it means to create culture in a place where culture may just be another item for consumption. Towards the end of the time I spent working on the album, I was also reading a lot of William Gibson, which was inspiring not only for his prescient (dark) vision of the future, but also how he writes about the way we’re haunted by images and ideas from the past. Listening back, I think this theme surfaces in “Victim of a New Age” and “Classic Cars.”