Land Of Waves, the 6th album by French electroacoustic composer Bérangère Maximin, came out in June of 2020, and when I first heard it, was was left utterly impressed, but I have not had a chance to review it until today. Maximin has an incredible talent to blend together nature, minerals, plant life, animal life, city life, and make it speak in one warmly organized opus. I will have to check if she has released something since then, but, as this is the latest work I can find from her, I can say with some measure of confidence that she’s coming ever-closer to the peak of her creative powers. When all is said and done, her body of work will be looked at with the same regards as Henry, Bayle and Schaeffer.
From her Bandcamp Site:
“Land of Waves”: three words evoking territories of plains and curves connected with each other by canals, footpaths, tunnels. The four parts of the album lead the listener into a hybrid land where the jungle meets the city … a succession of reliefs, surfaces, textures, layers create a large mosaic as if on a concrete wall which seems solid and definitive but is in fact penetrable, alterable.
For “Land of Waves”, BÉRANGÈRE MAXIMIN took inspiration from recordings she did in various city parks, abandoned properties and limits with the suburbs during her travels in Europe, the diversity of sources, the variations of events and the contrasts between day and night they offered, and reinterpreted them in the studio.
