Marie Davidson

Marie Davidson has always gone against the grain. The French-Canadian producer’s first four albums established her as a transgressive force in dance music, with her 2014 debut Perte d'identité (Loss of identity) laying the foundations of organic electronics and introspective storytelling that she would continue to build upon. Each release probed her “dualistic” relationship to nightlife while becoming increasingly saturated in its abundance of sounds, from Detroit techno to Italo disco, finally reaching a fever pitch on 2018’s Polaris Music Prize-nominated Working Class Woman. Putting the pitfalls of club culture and her own fractured identity under a withering satirical lens, Working Class Woman doesn’t wrestle with the existential as much as fling it around the dancefloor. After that, 2020’s Renegade Breakdown broke the mould entirely. With “a will to explore other styles of music,” Davidson formed a band with her husband and longtime collaborator Pierre Guerineau (also her counterpart in the duo Essaie Pas) and producer Asaël Robitaille. A deeply collaborative project, the trio wrote a slate of experimental pop songs inspired by records they would play at livingroom afterparties – jazz classics, French chanson, electronica – on which Davidson sang for the first time. Four years and a pandemic later, Davidson’s sixth studio album, City of Clowns, marks a return to the club – but not as you know it. The techno thump and scathing spoken-word delivery of Working Class Woman resurface at points, but the pop structures and melodic sensibilities of Renegade Breakdown also remain. It’s a “strange” sonic blend even by Davidson’s own standards. “It’s definitely linking back to what I was doing pre-pandemic, but with a bit of an evolution,” she says. “I didn't want to just repeat myself.” The sound and the spirit of the album are shaped, too, by the fact that Davidson has a new antagonist. This time it’s not club culture that’s coming for her sense of self, it’s Big Tech.

Auf ihrem jüngsten, mit der Elektronikformation Soulwax entstandenen Werk City of Clowns lässt sich Marie Davidson von den Gedanken der Ökonomin Shoshana Zuboff über den Überwachungskapitalismus inspirieren. Mit kühl-konfrontativem Vokalvortrag beschwört die kanadische Produzentin zu retrofuturistischem Techno und Alarm-Electro eine lückenlose digitale Kontrolle, die sich als Hintergrundrauschen in unseren Alltag eingeschrieben hat. Davidson hält in ihrer nachtschwarzen Maschinenmusik mit sarkastischer Schärfe und widerständiger Wucht dagegen: „All your asses on the floor“.