Meet one half of the curatorial team behind Sonic City 2026: 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, putting the pitfalls of club culture and her own fractured identity under a withering satirical lens.
In 2020, 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 also on the Sonic City line-up with his solo-project 'Feu St-Antoine') 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. It’s a “strange” sonic blend even by Davidson’s own standards. The sound and the spirit of the album are shaped by the fact that Davidson has a new antagonist. This time, the antagonist has shifted: no longer just club culture gnawing at her sense of self, but Big Tech itself – technology as a new form of economic oppression that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, unprecedented in power and free from checks and balances.
Her live shows are celebrated for her unusual, energetic stage presence. Davidson continues to use her work as a tool to navigate her place in the world, as an artist, as a woman, and as an entertainer. As high concept as it is open-hearted, she pushes the boundaries of electronic music to digest the most urgent questions of our time – and the result is disarmingly human.
Nick Verstand is a contemporary artist researching human perception through spatial audiovisual compositions. His autonomous installations and live performances investigate the frontier between the material and the immaterial, and are created through collaborative design processes aimed at breaking down social boundaries. The resulting intuitive experiences, co-creations of artist and audience, generate a hypnotizing environment for the subconscious mind.
Nick has collaborated with artists such as Iris van Herpen, Björk, Caterina Barbieri and Lykke Li.
