A french composer of electroacoustic music born in 1976 in Reunion Island.
After a childhood spent on the île de la Réunion, Bérangère Maximin’s first contacts with music came in the metropolis with various rock and world music groups. She obtained a baccalaureate with music option, then joined the electroacoustic composition class of Denis Dufour at the Perpignan Conservatory, where she received a Gold Medal (1999).
She subsequently settled in Paris, worked at organising concerts and also for the musical company Motus. In parallel, she was composing, notably for dance and art videos, for collective acousmatic concerts and audio-visual installations. From 2008, in her own studio, she has been developing a unique approach to sound art and electroacoustic music. Maximin also practises live electronics, focussing on real-time and improvisation. She gives concerts in the USA and in Europe, collaborating with of musicians such as Christian Fennesz, Richard Pinhas, Rhys Chatham and Fred Frith.
With a keen interest in post-punk, rock, dub, electronica and even pop, Maximin is also influenced by composers such as François Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Eliane Radigue and the electronics glitch scene. She reveals a taste for blending heterogeneous sounds with a sense for detail and reveals too a nuanced, dynamic sound style, often through the repetition of small fragments of sounds and the inclusion by transparence of the voice and various sound objects. In this way she shapes sounds that are hewn, customised, embellished with layers of field recording, creating textured sound environments while still cultivating the ambivalence of the support-based sounds and the total independence of their sources. Her works include La mécanique des ombres for support, first performed at Multiphonies, Radio France (2006); Kaddishowscope for support, first radiophonic performance for the programme Tapage nocturne of France Musique (2008); Décanta(c)tion for live voice and laptop, first performed at the festival Présences électroniques at the Centquatre in Paris (2010); Kalon Kakon for support, first performed at Multiphonies in the Maison des Pratiques Artistiques Amateurs in Paris (2011); Off the Page, electroacoustic piece with which she took part in the Grand Prix Lycéen des Compositeurs 2021. Bérengère Maximin has produced five albums: Tant que les heures passent (Tzadik, 2008), Infinitésimal (Sub Rosa, 2013), Dangerous Orbits (Crammed Discs, 2015), Frozen Refrains (Atlas Réalisations, 2017) and Land of Waves (Karlrecords, 2020).
