There is a particular kind of composer who does not simply write music but builds worlds and then invites you to get lost in them. With Cartografía interior, his first solo release on empreintes DIGITALes (IMED 25200), Diego Bermudez Chamberland does precisely that: he drafts a private cosmogony and hands us the map — though not without erasing the legend first.

Composed between 2020 and 2023 and revised in 2025, this 44-minute acousmatic triptych draws inspiration from Scandinavian mythology as recounted in Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. But let’s be clear: this is not programmatic folklore with surround-sound Vikings. Bermudez Chamberland is not illustrating sagas; he is metabolizing them. The mythic scaffolding becomes an energetic principle rather than narrative content. Yggdrasil may hover in the background, yet what we encounter is less a tree than a network of forces.

Online responses to the album have often highlighted its sculptural quality — and rightly so. Bermudez Chamberland, trained at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and shaped by years of dialogue with figures such as Martin Bédard and Louis Dufort, approaches sound as a malleable substance. His studio becomes both laboratory and observatory. Field recordings of natural elements, instrumental gestures from collaborators, and a battery of synthesis techniques are fused into a fixed stereo medium that feels anything but static. The “2.0” format might suggest limitation; the listening experience suggests vertigo.

The opening movement, Chronomundo, operates at a planetary scale. It unfolds like a slow rotation of cosmic matter, with dense textural strata that seem to drift across enormous distances. Spatial depth is not decorative here; it is structural. One senses tectonic shifts, orbital sweeps, the almost comical audacity of trying to sonify something as grand as cosmology. And yet, the piece resists bombast. Instead of thunderous clichés, we get evolving masses and microscopic fissures within them. Time feels stretched, elastic, as if the listener were perched somewhere between geological patience and stellar combustion.

If Chronomundo maps the macrocosm, Destin // Trouble zooms in on turbulence. The double slash in the title becomes audible as montage logic: call-and-response fragments, sudden anticipations, sonic behaviors that appear, scatter, regroup. Bermudez Chamberland personifies nature without anthropomorphizing it. Woody timbres sprout and dart; iterative flutters evoke insect wings clustering around a light source; storms accumulate not as Hollywood drama but as layered agitation. The movement is playful in its complexity — one can almost imagine the composer smiling while coaxing chaotic systems into temporary alliances.

What stands out is the music’s vitality. Reviews circulating online frequently note how alive the material feels, how it refuses to settle into static drones. Even when textures sustain, something is always mutating at the edges. Energy here is not merely volume or density; it is behavioral. Sounds behave like entities with impulses, hesitations, and collisions.

The final movement, Punto maximal, turns inward — or downward — toward the infinitely small. If the first movement surveyed mythic vastness and the second dramatized conflict, this one examines intimacy. The microscopic becomes epic. Tiny iterative “points” punctuate the sonic field, suggesting cellular or particulate life. The humor, perhaps unintended, lies in the realization that the smallest gestures can feel as overwhelming as galaxies. Bermudez Chamberland treats the micro-world with the same grandeur he afforded the cosmic, collapsing scale into perception.

It is tempting to describe Cartografía interior as immersive, but that word has grown tired from overuse. What makes this work compelling is not immersion alone, but its elasticity of perspective. The composer revisited and revised the piece in 2025, reinserting materials, rebalancing energies — effectively bending his own past into the present. The album becomes a meditation on time not only thematically, but structurally. Past, present, and speculative future coexist in the studio’s layered memory.

There is also something tender beneath the mythological ambition. The project’s genesis traces back to youthful readings of Nordic lore, encouraged by a mother who nourished imagination with books. That detail matters. Beneath the sophisticated sound design and conceptual architecture lies a child enthralled by infinite worlds and cosmic trees. Cartografía interior is, in a sense, a grown-up answer to that early wonder.

And perhaps that is its quiet achievement: it reminds us that mythology was never about gods alone. It was about scale — about locating oneself between the titanic and the microscopic. Bermudez Chamberland does not give us a literal Valhalla or a faithful sonic Yggdrasil. He gives us thresholds, energies, morphologies. He gives us a universe that feels invented yet strangely familiar.

In the end, the “inner cartography” of the title is less about mapping territory than about mapping attention. The record suggests that every listener carries a cosmogony inside — vast, turbulent, teeming with unseen life. This album simply hands you the coordinates and says: explore.

With the release Cartografía interior (Inner Cartography), Diego states that ’I had envisioned exploring Scandinavian mythology through my acousmatic compositions’ although why a Québécois Costarican would do this isn’t actually explained, nor does the music picture any such thing to me as a listener.

As a triptych, each of the three pieces lock on to themes also contained in the other pieces, so that it all — in effect — feels like one work. Its tumultuous writhing and crashing, ripping and breaking sounds, picture to me great devastating storms, with buildings ripped apart and collapsing under the strain. Couple that with multi-pitched filtering giving it all a surreal 3D feel, it’s all quite a spectacular and exhausting listen. Play it loud and you neighbours will probably think the house is falling down!

So, quite where any of the Scandinavian mythology fits in with all this I don’t know. An interesting release, but certainly one I’d need to be prepared for and in the mood!

Chissà com’era il primo suono udibile. Con la sua elettronica sperimentale, il sound artist Diego Bermudez Chamberland ci trasporta all’origine dell’universo, tramite la cosmogonia e la mitologia scandinava.

Cartografía interior è il nome dell’album, uscito per Empreintes DIGITALes, ed è un titolo tanto suggestivo quanto indicativo del percorso musicale, svolto in cinque anni da Bermudez Chamberland. Si tratta di tre brani, della durata rispettiva di 12’43”, 18’12” e 13’31”. Sono tre tracce avvolgenti realizzate unendo fitte texture a elaborazioni di suoni di strumenti e di elementi naturali.

Per la fortuna di Bermudez Chamberland, l’anno scorso mi sono imbattuto ne “Il Mulino di Amleto”, folgorante saggio di Giorgio de Santillana e Herta von Dechend, per cui non sono del tutto digiuno di questi riferimenti. Siccome è inutile descrivervi tutti i sibili, le tessiture cristalline, i boati roboanti e i vari tschhuaaaooonnn che si possono ascoltare, posso invece riportarvi qualche stralcio dal saggio, che si rivela una lettura perfettamente adatta all’ascolto di questa cartografia interiore.

Il primo brano si chiama Chronomundo, titolo che evoca l’origine del tempo, quando ancora non esisteva come dimensione. Il riferimento preciso di Bermudez Chamberland è nel racconto mitologico “Edda”, di Snorri Sturluson, risalente circa al 1220. La libera ispirazione parte dal frassino Yggdrasil, un albero, simbolo ricorrente quando si parla di divino. Non a caso, il nome gaelico della quercia è “duir”, che rimanda a “door”, cioè porta. Non a caso, una storica band si ispira alle porte della percezione…

Il secondo brano si chiama Destin // Trouble, si può intuirne il tono minaccioso. Quale occasione per leggere della macina del titano Fróði. La sua macina si chiamava Grotti ed era gigantesca. Fróði reclutò due fanciulle giganti, Fenja e Menja, capaci di far funzionare il Grotti, e ordinò loro di produrre oro, pace e felicità. Grazie a Fróði quindi regnava la pace, ma egli era avido, perciò sfruttava le due fanciulle fino allo sfinimento. Una notte Menja, infuriata, fermò il lavoro e cantò un canto tremendo, un’imprecazione profetica:

“Vedo ardere fuoco / a oriente della fortezza / son deste le notizie di guerra / è un monito. / Schiera d’armati qui / s’affretta / per incendiare / la dimora del Re (…) Maciniamo ancora! / Il figlio di Yrsa / vendicherà su Fróði / la morte di Hálfdan”. (Fonte: G DE SANTILLANA, H VON DECHEND, Il Mulino di Amleto, Gli Adelphi, Milano, 1993, pp. 118-120).

E così, dalla macina uscirono schiere di soldati. Il re del mare Mýsingr uccise Fróði, portò in nave con sé le gigantesse nel mare con il gigantesco mulino, ordinando loro di macinare. Ora dalla macina uscì sale. La nave sprofondò, e il mulino con essa, ma senza smettere di funzionare. Fu così che il mare divenne salato, e inoltre si formò un gorgo, il celebre Maelstrom.

Infatti i suoni di Bermudez Chamberland danno l’impressione di un gigantesco gorgo impetuoso, che ci portano nel terzo e ultimo capitolo, Punto maximal, dove dall’infinitamente grande passiamo all’infinitamente piccolo, al microscopico, sondando con fantasia le frammentazioni della materia, fino all’atomo, tradotte sonicamente in sintesi granulare.

Gorghi, spirali, galassie, elettroni che ruotano intorno ai protoni: ci sono dei pattern regolari a tutte le dimensioni, e la Cartografìa Interior di Diego Bermudez Chamberland ce li fa udire tutti!

Gletscher prallen aufeinander, Eis und Schnee fliegen umher und in den Wäldern ist der Teufel los. Wir können die Gedanken von Diego Bermudez Chamberland zu seinem Projekt lesen, doch die Räume, die er erschaffen hat, müssen wir selbst mit unseren Assoziationen füllen. Das ist überwältigend und Kopfkino vom Allerfeinsten!