Artist: Flavien Berger
Album: Plouf! (Léviathan)
Label: Pan European Recording
Link: paneuropeanrecording.com
Style: Pop, French chanson
Parisian Flavien Berger comes from a family involved in the film industry, and his father is also a jazz critic. As a teenager, he listened to rap and discovered composition with the game Music 2000. While studying at ENSCI – Les Ateliers, he formed the Sin collective with other students, where he was responsible for the sound design of their creations. They later moved to Brussels, and it is from the Belgian capital that the artist releases his music, where he has made a name for himself with two EPs and, above all, his first album in 2015, which demonstrates great originality in compositions based on electronics and home studio recording.
Plouf! is an in-depth reinterpretation, ten years on, of that first album. This time around, Flavien Berger has chosen to abandon computers and sequencers in favor of musicians who will literally recompose his tracks. The result is a more organic sound, somewhat timeless, reminiscent of when the great French arrangers experimented with psychedelia. It suggests Jean-Claude Vannier or the weightless moments of Alain Goraguer’s soundtrack for the movie Planète Sauvage. The collective and the acoustics take us to musical lands that play with the usual reference points, provided we pay attention.
The new Léviathan hasn’t completely lost its aquatic sounds, but it has gained a warmth and fluidity that only playing as a group can bring. And indeed, it is the musicians and their instruments that are brought to the fore. The vocals are placed just below them, favoring their contribution to the atmosphere rather than the comprehension of the lyrics. The timbres, and in particular the sound of the synthesizer, seem to pay homage to French studio recordings of the 1970s, when artists experimented with sound without completely letting go.