After his fourth wife left him, in 1970, Philip K. Dick spent several years in his California home living semi-communally with a rotating cast of mostly teenage drug users and ingesting heavy amounts of amphetamines. These experiences inspired the sci-fi author’s 1977 opus A Scanner Darkly, which envisioned a not-so-distant, dystopian Orange County, featuring a corporate-run rehab center called New-Path. For their second album on DFA, New Path, the Montreal husband-and-wife electronic duo Essaie Pas draw on the novel’s themes, including addiction, loss, and identity, while venturing down previously unexplored sonic corridors.
Although a knowledge of the source material (or Richard Linklater’s 2006 film adaptation, starring a rotoscoped Keanu Reeves) isn’t essential to unpacking the follow-up to Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau’s 2016 LP, Demain Est Une Autre Nuit, its depiction of a paranoid society in the throes of a national drug crisis seems grimly prescient today. The pair have said in interviews that their own and loved ones’ past struggles with substance abuse made it easy to relate to the book’s weighty topics. Subsequently, the six tracks here frequently capture the feelings of claustrophobia and despair associated with a bad trip, using unrelenting percussion, twitchy analog synths, and half-French, half-English incantations.
After working on separate projects for the past year—Guerineau has produced for Montreal acts including Bernardino Femminielli, Pelada, and Sleazy (Davidson and Ginger Breaker)—they’ve brought what they’ve learned back to their own lab. Compared to their previous record, and Davidson’s excellent club-oriented solo effort Adieux Au Dancefloor (released on Veronica Vasicka’s Cititrax sublabel), New Path finds them taking a more experimental approach to song structures. Half the tracks clock in at over six minutes, allowing the duo to build and sustain tension, and occasionally to pull their compositions apart to see how they work, like engineers with a circuit board. More than ever, there’s a cinematic quality to their music, whether in the pulsating chase-scene techno of “Substance M” or the uneasy, string-laden “Futur Parlé.” “Les agents des stups” (“Narcotics Officer”) recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal Good Time soundtrack, layering oscillating synths, whirring sirens, and unidentifiable all-points bulletins into a frenetic seven-minute centerpiece.
What sets Essaie Pas apart from their coldwave contemporaries is their ability to find moments of levity within the darkness. Similar to Davidson’s motorik collaboration with the London-based producer Not Waving, the hallucinatory standout “Complet Brouillé” counterbalances her ominous proclamations (“I don’t expect to live long”) with echoing laughter and distorted dial tones. The biggest departure for the duo is the ambient title track, which recreates dialogue spoken by the novel’s protagonist, Bob Arctor, after being transferred to a farming facility and put to work. While the monologue, made all the more disorienting here by its text-to-speech rendition, is delivered by a character who’s lost his friends and sanity due to drugs, it’s also tangible and vulnerable. Bird chirps creep in toward the song’s closing, but it’s too late for him to hear them.
While New Path is hardly the first album inspired by Dick’s futuristic worlds—genre-diverse artists such as Bloc Party, Gary Numan, and Janelle Monáe have referenced the prolific author in their songs—it is perhaps the one with the timeliest message. “There’s no guide or easy way to deal with such heavy realities, but as they’re rooted [in] our human condition, the least we can do is to acknowledge them,” Guerineau said in a Noisey interview. Beyond simply making surface references to scramble suits and fields of blue flowers, Essaie Pas connect to something deeper—real human emotion.
