Marie Davidson LIVE with special guest Tony Price

Date: April 5th
Time: 7PM-10PM
Tickets are available at http://www.debaser.ca/event/marie-davidson-live

On April 15, transgressive force of Montreal’s electronic music underground Marie Davidson presents a live performance of her new album City of Clowns at Club SAW, joined by special guest Tony Price.

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 living-room 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.

Tony Price is a producer, engineer, and DJ from Greektown, Toronto. His work on L.I.E.S. Records, Telephone Explosion, and Maximum Exposure showcases fearless exploration across genres—classic house, funk, electro, and the outer limits of electronic jazz and musique concrète.

Since 2017, Tony has released several EPs and over ten full length LPs. This stretch of records is a masterclass in uncouth production techniques, genre-melding and sonic satire, a set of skills that Price has developed over 15+ years of record production experience.

In 2017 he founded Maximum Exposure Inc., a record label, creative services unit and music production company that has licensed recordings, provided bespoke music composition, and audio production expertise to a wide range of clients in the worlds of music, fashion, and media.