Marie Davidson’s sixth album finds the Canadian DJ and producer with one eye on the dance floor, the other lingering suspiciously on her smartphone. Produced in collaboration with Soulwax and Pierre Guerineau (Davidson’s partner in minimal wave duo Essaie Pas), City of Clowns re-embraces the precise, machine-tooled techno and strutting electroclash of 2018’s Working Class Woman, but there’s a stronger sense of both the personal and the political here – not to mention a clear distrust of big tech and the insidious way it has come to monetize and dominate our lives.
That overarching theme is laid out clearly on the opening track, ‘Validations Weight’, a shimmering sci-fi scene-setter that finds Davidson calmly reciting a text that starts, “The machine hive has become the role model for a new human hive, in which all march in peaceful unison, toward the same direction, based on the same correct understanding, in order to construct a world free of mistakes, accidents, and random messes,” and ends with, “The progress of the third modernity, offered by surveillance capital, is the answer to the quest for effective life together.” Resistance is futile. I am Locutus of Borg.
The album was inspired in part by Davidson’s reading of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, an alarmingly prescient text that drew clear lines between the technology and business models employed by mega-corporations like Google, Meta, and Amazon and gross invasions of privacy, as well as the rise of a new wave of totalitarianism. The book drew accolades and criticism at the time, but six years later with spyware in your speakers, smartphone, and fridge, Microsoft pushing laptops that record our every keystroke, and, y’know, everything that’s happening in America right now, it’s hard not to think that Zuboff was entirely correct.
Davidson weaves this throughout an LP which is also – in case there was ever any doubt, coming from this producer – packed with party-ready bangers. ‘Demolition’ is a pulsing cut of no wave-tinged electro made more ominous by its opening chant (“Extraction. Rendition. Domination. Demolition”) and a lyric that probes at the pernicious nature of social media: “Your bed / your breakfast / your secrets / your shares / I’ll tease you / nudge you / till I own you.” Sung in a deeper register than usual for Davidson, it brings to mind Matthew Dear’s similarly dystopian and 80s-inflected Black City.
The incredibly titled ‘Push Me Fuckhead’ drops the pace to a near industrial grind as Davidson icily recites a furious litany of present day buzz phrases: “We can upgrade your monthly plan … Wait until we verify you are not a robot”. But while the track is scathing, it’s also genuinely funny, a quality that has long been an essential component in Davidson’s writing. Sure, there’s a message here, but it’s delivered with a wink and a resigned smile as she finally lands on, “And bitch / don’t forget to recycle.”
Even with this much thematic weight, however, it would be wrong to call City of Clowns a concept album. It’s nowhere near as all-encompassing as that epithet implies. Sometimes the link to Davidson’s grand scheme is limited to simply the track title, as on ‘Statistical Modelling’, an ice-cold cut of instrumental techno from the Gerald Donald school. Davidson’s vocals are barely present here, replaced instead with a cosmic synthline, crisp snares, and a rigid bassline that feels like it’s been plucked straight from Dopplereffekt’s all time classic Gesamtkunstwerk.
Although Davidson has been making music for almost twenty years now (since 2007, initially as half of experimental duo Les Momies de Palerme), she has only relatively recently taken up DJing professionally, something she credits with changing the way that she produces tracks. Certainly this is a more direct, club-focused album than her previous records. ‘Fun Times’, after its rigid and starkly percussive first minute, reveals itself as a pure pop throwback to 2020’s Renegade Breakdown, with a vocal melody a little reminiscent of Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’. ‘Contrarian’ goes harder. It’s a straightforward acid-techno face-melter that shrugs off any of the record’s weightier concerns in favour of the sheer physical pleasure of dance music played loud.
Then there’s ‘Sexy Clown’, a simultaneously camp and seductive electroclash heater built around a filthy looped bassline and the car windscreen-wiper swish of synths which finds Davidson reflecting on the expectations she faces from the ‘personality mercenaries’ – to steal and misuse a term from Zuboff – in the music industry. “I should pace myself / be more coherent / keep it relevant / with games and amusement” she sighs early on (because after all, what is a musician or a DJ if not a clown performing for the attention of others?), before pushing back defiantly with “I don’t think I fit any categories of the given list”.
‘Y.A.A.M.’ (an acronym that may, if the accompanying music video is to be believed, stand for “Your Asses Are Mine”) returns to this theme again. The influence of the Dewaele brothers is palpable here (and indeed a faster Soulwax remix vamps its way onto the end of the album as a bonus) in the subterranean bass and pummelling beats. Vocally, Davidson is back in the imperious mode deployed on ‘Sexy Clown’ calling out “fake positivity” and “entrepreneurs and producers and freelancers to managers / the whole wide world of bravados, upset liars and insiders” before finding her people on the dancefloor. It’s gloriously spiteful while also offering a final flicker of tenderness and gratitude towards her audience. “Don’t be fooled, I’m not that cool,” she admits. “I stick with the weirdos.”
Referenced artists
Soulwax
The Quietus Writers’ 50 Favourite Dance Remixes
In a recent interview with Enfnts Terribles, Davidson reflected on music and her ambivalent relationship to technology. “I was already making electronic music, and I don’t use AI in my process. But where it hit me was realising how algorithms affect how artists present their work on social media. The danger is that more and more artists tailor their posts to please the algorithm, often to the detriment of their artistic practice.”
Or, to quote Zuboff again, “You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The ‘product’ derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.” City of Clowns wraps up with ‘Unknowing’. Altogether darker and stranger than the rest of the album, it dismantles the sonic palette established over the preceding eight tracks with a sledgehammer. Initially skewing closer to the sort of heady braindance you might expect from a Rephlex compilation, it reassembles itself into a cut of resolute futurist funk that sees Davidson fully rejecting that drive to please the machines and feed the algorithm by choosing to “keep to myself / the magic / and the torments”. A terrific, wholly self-assured record that remains defiantly human in the age of ubiquitous AI.
