Birds on a Wire
Birds on a Wire
In the first place there was the singing.
It is with these words of a biblical simplicity that the genesis of Birds On a Wire, the project of
Rosemary Standley and Dom La Nena, could be told. Singing as a source and a horizon, as an
anchor and a way out, singing in its widest and slightest folds… Such could be the founding terms
of this duo, experts in all-round cover versions, born in 2012 on the initiative of Sonia Bester,
alias Madamelune, while Rosemary Standley wanted to open a new path, at the crossroads of the
flamboyant career accomplished for a good decade with the group Moriarty.
Before reaching the high mountain tops of Moriarty, Rosemary Standley climbed the lush side
of American folk, following in the footsteps of her musician father Wayne Standley and the
rough but no less fertile side of lyrical singing, which she learned at the Paris Conservatoire.
For the past ten years, far from conforming to the monomaniacal imperative of her sole career
with Moriarty, she has been constantly opening up new avenues of research and varying her
pleasures, whether it be by strolling at the junctions with musical theatre (Private Domain, a
creation by Laurence Equilbey, A Queen of Heart by Juliette Deschamps, Love I Obey with
Bruno Helstroffer’s Band On a dit dit on fait un spectacle by Sonia Bester, Alice vs. Lewis by
Masha Makaieff…) or by making beautiful escapes that open up new musical perspectives.
On her side, Dom La Nena, split between her native Brazil, Buenos Aires where she spent her
adolescence and perfected her playing as a cellist, and Paris where she finally embraced the
profession of musician, has also travelled through several worlds to better develop her own. She
trained in the requirements of classical music before putting her bow, her strings and her allround
musicality at the service of pop and pop stars such as Jane Birkin, Jeanne Moreau,
Etienne Daho and Piers Faccini.
It was with the support of this latter that she took her solo career off to a flying start and in 2013
signed the album Ela, soon to be followed in 2015 by Soyo: two sensitive manifestos in favour
of a song which, by shaping itself in the crucible of an unattached life, seems to have both
cleaned itself up and freed itself from many codes.
It is not only their voices that Rosemary and Dom interweave: it is also the vibrant flow of their
memories. Lively and vital memories that are constantly regenerated and reshaped by the pleasure
of playing, inventing and sharing that has characterized them since their meeting. These two
partners in escape succeed each time in capturing this native emotion, this first spell, this initial
spark that, one day of grace, awakened them and married them to music for life.
The show and the new album Ramages are the proof that our two birds, wherever they are – on a
wire, in the trees, on the ground – draw with their song a language without borders, of a universal
beauty that touches the informed as well as the profane, the erudite as well as the dilettantes.