Bérangère Maximin

Bérangère Maximin is a French sound artist who creates textural electroacoustic soundscapes that are both abstract and intimate. Her dense and rich compositions speak to the listener with their utter emotionalism, depth and vivid colorfulness. While listening to Bérangère’s music, you sometimes feel like you’re looking at your mundane surroundings through a magnifying glass and noticing deeper layers that could seem charming and confusing at the same time. There are various manifestations of this throughout her vast discography. If No One Is An Island, released by Sub Rosa (featuring Fennesz and Richard Pinhas among others), is bristling with light, distorted haziness and organic murkiness, Dangerous Orbits is a much darker affair, filled with lower frequencies and bursts of uneasiness and disorientation yet maintaining an atmospheric coherence. Her last LP, Frozen Refrains came out on Craig Leon’s Atlas Realisations and it’s also a powerful offering that explores emotional dissonances, subjectivity, memory and their complexities. Its multi-angled compositions are like contemplations, providing as many questions as they do answers.

STM 268 has a similar attention to detail as her own music. Over one hour Bérangère leads us across myriads of soundscapes, creating the effect of a kaleidoscope or a stream of film stills, with images of past and present intertwining. She divides the mix into three parts, the first part being more textural, the second more intensely expressive and political, while the third is a sort of mixture between the first two. The mix is somewhat collage-like in nature, with spoken word parts changing electroacoustic drones and mellow harmonic brushes overwashing noisier patterns. The mix floats like some avant-garde film – precisely edited, but with no linear structure. Or it could also evoke a psychogeographical trip through urban surroundings, where hidden narratives keep emerging.

In the records

Bérangère Maximin on the mix

I would divide this mix into several parts: the first part refers to music history, with composers revisiting it, editing and mixing it their own way. The influences and styles being various, from pure concrète music to instrumental and cinematic sensitivities, a good number of them strongly contrasted and articulated. Most of the pieces I’ve picked were composed within the last 20 years. I know some of the composers personally, but not all of them. There are just a few really renowned names, like Coldcut, but what I’ve inserted of them into this mix, with the promoter’s consent, is a personal bootleg I made in Toulouse (south of France) back in 1996, where you can literally hear them manipulating the material live, articulating it with vinyl scratches and cuts and adding samples.

The second part is more urban and political I would say. I’ve stuck works from noise artists or sound poetry pieces, then some more minimalistic and monochrome music, with tension and suspense, most of it being acousmatic composers of diverse styles. There are great acousmatic names from France, who are truly considered important, though I’m sure they don’t have that aura outside France’s borders and are kind of obscure, which is why I picked them (e. g. Michèle Bokanowski, Jacques Lejeune). For these two names I’d mention that their pieces were composed in the late 1970s but they found a label to release their stuff only decades later. Lionel Marchetti’s release on Monotype also fits into this category. I’ve also added a very rare Hector Zazou piece composed in collaboration with David Sylvian, an obscure one that only a few people have heard of.

I’ll finish with saying that my only interest here is to show the kind of textures and sound material I really personally dig, all instinctively put together, the third and last part being a tighter mix of the previous two parts.

Bérangère Maximin is part of 2018’s SHAPE platform artist roster.