Birds on a wire

Twelve years ago, their paths briefly crossed: Rosemary Standley, the bewitching Franco-American voice revealed by Moriarty, met Dom La Nena, a young Franco-Brazilian cellist and singer with a hushed timbre. Brought together by shared roots, classical training, and a mutual attraction to twilight repertoires and languages, their meeting immediately resonated as a musical inevitability. What was initially meant to be a fleeting project — a constellation of covers for voice and cello imagined for a series of concerts at the Cité de la Musique in Paris — gradually took root. Like the migratory birds whose name they adopted, Birds on a Wire rose with no set path. Leonard Cohen guided them in the beginning, but their songs soon became their own map of the world. The audience followed.

The alchemy was immediate — and irreversible. Their self-titled debut album, released in 2014, celebrated songs of childhood and memory, ancestral laments, baroque gems, and Latin American folk pearls. The duo did not simply reinterpret: they stripped down, transformed, and delicately wove languages and centuries together. Six years later, Ramages revealed new feathers: those of Pink Floyd, Violeta Parra, Jacques Brel, Gabriel Fauré… Their palette widened, the atmospheres deepened — sometimes silky, sometimes stormy. Selling nearly 50,000 copies, the album reached a loyal and curious audience, proof that a free and delicate work can carve its path beyond well-trodden roads.

Birds on a Wire have performed more than 300 sold-out concerts on some of the most prestigious stages in France and abroad — from the Philharmonie de Paris to the Olympia, from Théâtre du Châtelet to Bouffes du Nord, as well as the Théâtre antique de Fourvière, the Basilica of Saint-Denis, the Philharmonie du Luxembourg, and the Auditorium of Radio France. Their collaborations sketch a vibrant and ever-shifting landscape: British arranger Mike Smith (Damon Albarn, Blur, Gorillaz), the Britten Sinfonia, the Maîtrise de Radio France, as well as Stephan Eicher, Philippe Jaroussky, the Orchestre national des Pays de la Loire, the Youth Choir of the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre national de Bretagne, magician Yann Frisch, dancers Kaori Ito and Rana Gorgani…

In May 2024, the Louvre Museum entrusted them with a Carte Blanche for a series of exceptional evenings. Wandering through the museum’s galleries, they created an immersive musical journey, blending heritage resonance with artistic intimacy. From this experience came a film, Une nuit au Louvre avec Birds on a Wire, produced for Arte. In September 2024, they collaborated with composer Gustave Rudman to create the original soundtrack for Alessandro Michele’s very first show for the house of Valentino, presented during Paris Fashion Week — a highlight celebrated for its acoustic poetry and aesthetic freedom. Their music — both embodied and timeless — has naturally found its place in film and television, accompanying L’Etoile filante by Abel & Gordon (Locarno 2023), as well as the unique worlds of Léa Mysius (Ava), Tonie Marshall (Numéro une), Erwan Le Duc (Perdrix), the D’Innocenzo brothers (Favolacce), and the Netflix series Lidia Poët.

In 2025, a new chapter begins: Nuées ardentes, their third album (out October 3), is a collection of metamorphoses. For the first time, Birds on a Wire takes on a repertoire of extremely well-known pop, rock, and French songs embedded in the collective memory: Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat, The Lovecats by The Cure, People Are Strange by The Doors, Perlimpinpin by Barbara, and La peinture à l’huile by Bobby Lapointe. These iconic songs are revisited in their own way — with grace, boldness, and a touch of gentle irreverence. Sometimes stripped to the bone, sometimes reimagined in expansive textures where the cello becomes orchestra, keyboard, or percussion, these familiar titles take on a new, hauntingly singular tone.

They sit alongside Italian baroque arias and traditional Latin American songs, sketching a sensitive map of adolescence — that incandescent age where one teeters between shadow and light. The album explores the many faces of this passage: identity struggles, feelings of inner exile, burgeoning desires, naive impulses, solitude, awakening sensuality, rebellion, or the dream of elsewhere. These nuées ardentes (pyroclastic flows), borrowed from volcanic language, evoke the underground tensions and burning surges that precede one’s awakening to self. With the exceptional participation of the Maîtrise de Radio France, the arrangements take on a new orchestral scale, while preserving the duo’s minimalist and organic signature. On stage, the magic of Étienne Saglio — with glades, apparitions, illusions — envelops their harmonies in a veil of wonder and mystery.