You’d be forgiven for thinking you were about to hear a soundtrack to a sci-fi film, pressing play on the first track of Marie Davidson’s new album City Of Clowns. The creation of a dystopian world — a “human hive” appears to be in progress. Walls of synth tumble and are rebuilt, instruments and machines work in apparent harmony, and all the while there’s a feeling that some bigger, eerier force is at work. “You march in certainty, like the smart machines,” Davidson recites, as her familiar Québécoise tones metamorphose into the generic voice of Polly, Amazon’s AI text-to-speech tool. “You learn to sacrifice your freedom for collective knowledge imposed by others and for the sake of their guaranteed outcomes. The progress of the third modernity offered by surveillance capital is the answer to the quest for effective life together.”
These words are a collaged excerpt from Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 disquieting tome The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the first book of Davidson’s Baker’s Dozen. “The passage explains what we sacrificed for the idea of progress with artificial intelligence and algorithmic predictions,” says Davidson. “I changed the “we” to “you” so it’s like the machine, the AI, is talking to us.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the books that follow on her list are either overtly sci-fi or relate in some way to the genre’s preferred concerns: technology, economy, the environment, the future of humanity. City Of Clowns reverberates with references to AI, human verification captchas, and data markets, perfectly underscored by Davidson’s usual minimal, harsh electronic style, one that defined her 2018 album Working Class Woman.
What’s different about City Of Clowns, though, is that Davidson co-produced the album with her longtime collaborator and mixing engineer — and husband — Pierre Guerineau, along with David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax. The Dewaele brothers’ remix of Davidson’s 2018 single Work It has become a dancefloor staple, while Davidson and Guerineau last worked together in 2020 as part of her everything-but-club-music band L’Œil Nu. “I missed working with other people,” Davidson explains. “I asked if Pierre wanted to co-produce because he’s good, and likes pop structures and melodic ideas. ‘Fun Times’ was the first track I asked him to co-produce and it turned out so great that we decided to co-produce the entire album. A year later, I decided to work with Deewee [the label founded by Soulwax]. We went to Ghent a couple of times and worked with Dave and Stephen at the Deewee studio. It was a long evolution and a long process of many chapters in the making of the album, which is new for me.”
The end product is a record made for sweaty basements, for humanity at its most raucous and joyous and liberated. Davidson wants “all your asses on the floor”, particularly during the almost Madonna-like propulsion of ‘Fun Times’ and the acid rager ‘Contrarian’. “I was back making music after a while and I intended to have fun. I wanted to do something energetic,” she says. She’d also recently got behind the decks. “It’s when I started DJing for real, professionally, not just playing tracks, that I had the drive to make an album. It was the mix of reading Surveillance Capitalism at the same time as starting DJing.”
The album merges weighty intellectual concepts with unfettered emotion, an approach reflected in her choice of books. Alongside the treatises on technology and economy are books about the psyche, femininity, and music, books that celebrate the rawest and grittiest parts of what it is to be human. In a similar way, City Of Clowns constructs a dystopia, then rails mightily against it. This city is a place for lust and sweat and humour and misfits. “Don’t be fooled / I’m not that cool,” Davidson winks. “I stick with the weirdos.”
Marie Davidson’s new album City Of Clowns is released on 28 February via Deewee / Because Music. To begin reading her Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
