New Path

Essaie Pas always seek out fresh challenges. After all, there's a whole universe of sounds, sights, and new ideas to explore. Emerging from Montreal's sprawling electronic scene, the duo -Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau- feel completely free to express themselves, to sketch out hitherto unmapped musical regions.

Forthcoming album New Path takes this one step further. The duo's fifth album to date - and second on powerhouse label DFA Records -is loosely based on Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly", a classic of dystopian science fiction.

"I read the book a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, and it had a strong impression on me," explains Pierre. "In our previous work we always looked to music as inspiration in our lives, but this time we felt the desire to try something different, that's not based on ourselves but on someone else's universe. It was going to be more conceptual, more political."

New Path touches on personal ground, on addiction, loss, and the lingering strength of identity within late capitalism's mass media paranoia. It pins down the central character's destructive addiction, using this as a metaphor to explore the dichotomous rupture between our inner lives and our social environment, one that is often fed and soothed by drug abuse, social media, or any kind of dependence.

"I think it touches us on many levels," Pierre continues. "We can talk about drug addiction issues, we can talk about the mass surveillance world we live in, but there's also the experience of loss, of grief. I was surprised by how the book felt so modern and accurate to the time we live in right now. Dick's visions of surveillance are the reality of social control today."