Like a live concert with no beginning or end, sixty Australian finches dance between the strings of twelve electric guitars in the sacred silence of Le Château in Aubenas. From Here to Ear (v.25), the twenty-fifth incarnation of a work that has been continuously reinventing itself since 1999, captures the ephemeral essence of what Céleste Boursier-Mougenot calls "living music"—where birds settle on the strings of instruments as if they were wires between city roofs or branches of a tree. There's something deeply moving about watching these small beings bounce along like popping corn, inadvertently creating chords that resonate through amplifiers. The chirping of the finches and the sounds they make as their beaks and claws connect physically with the electric instruments fill the hall with ambient music—a symphony of chance that belongs neither to rock nor jazz, but to an entirely new sonic territory.
Like John Cage's revolutionary embrace of environmental sound and chance operations, or Max Neuhaus's transformative sound installations, Boursier-Mougenot builds on the experimental traditions of the 1960s while creating something entirely his own. Yet where Cage invited us to hear the incidental sounds of our surroundings, From Here to Ear creates a genuinely collaborative space where agency is shared between species, technology, and human presence in ways that feel both ancient and utterly contemporary. Recorded during the art center's inauguration in July 2024 and mixed at GMEA in Albi by Benjamin Maumus, this document preserves the ad hoc poetic quality of this aural-visual display of daily life and activity. "Looking through the window, my feeling was that I want to make music from these birds on the wire", the artist recalls of the childhood inspiration behind this work. Thirty years later, he has realized this dream more beautifully than could have been imagined.
From Here to Ear transcends sound art to become a meditation on coexistence, where images become sounds, movements provoke images in a perpetual chain of actions and reactions. A rare document of a work that continues to evolve, surprise, and move after more than two decades. Music born from living together—fragile, unpredictable, necessary.
