An ear is a rather indiscreet creature. It cannot close its eyes, look away or politely pretend not to have noticed something. It collects voices, footsteps, machines, weather, fragments of conversation and noises whose meaning may only become apparent decades later. "L’oreille Voleuse", the extraordinary collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari, Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke, begins with precisely this idea: sound as something accidentally stolen from the world and subsequently kept as a memory.

Brunhild Ferrari is hardly a newcomer to this particular form of acoustic kleptomania. After working with Pierre Schaeffer at the ORTF's research department, she developed her own practice in electroacoustic composition and radio art, while also spending four decades alongside Luc Ferrari and later becoming one of the principal guardians of his extensive archive. Her approach has always been less about constructing an artificial sonic universe than remaining alert to the one already happening around us. "L’oreille Voleuse" gathers recordings accumulated over many years, mostly on magnetic tape, and turns them into a twenty-minute composition in which memory refuses to behave chronologically.

The original version is wonderfully disorientating. Sounds appear without announcing their origins: voices emerge from somewhere inside the texture, environmental noises pass across the stereo field, mechanical hums and sudden disturbances interrupt one another, while occasional musical gestures seem to materialise from the surrounding debris. There is a sense of travelling without ever being given a map. The piece does not ask us to identify every sound. In fact, doing so would rather miss the point. These are not exhibits in a sonic museum. They are memories whose labels have fallen off.

Ferrari's connection with Luc Ferrari (they were partners in life and sometimes in art) inevitably hovers over the project, particularly his "Presque rien" works, where apparently insignificant environmental details could become the substance of a composition. But "L’oreille Voleuse" is not an exercise in historical reconstruction. The recordings are treated as living material, with all the ambiguity that implies. What was once simply heard becomes something remembered, and what is remembered is never quite identical to what actually happened.
Then the second side changes the rules.

Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke take the original material and perform it anew, recorded live at La Muse en Circuit in Paris in October 2025. Their version is not a respectful dusting-off of Ferrari's archive. It is more like entering somebody else's dream and moving the furniture around. Certain sounds disappear, others become more prominent, new textures are introduced, and the relationship between foreground and background is constantly renegotiated.

Ishibashi, whose work moves freely between experimental music, improvisation, songwriting and film composition, and O’Rourke, whose career has wandered through contemporary composition, electronic music, rock, improvisation and production with almost unreasonable persistence, are particularly well suited to this task. Neither approaches the source material as something that must remain untouched. They listen for possibilities.

The result is darker and more unstable than the original, with electronics and instrumental sounds creating new pressure around Ferrari's recordings. Yet the intervention never feels like an attempt to improve the source. That distinction is crucial. The duo does not correct the archive; they activate it.

This makes the two versions fascinating when heard together. The first is a collection of memories assembled by their owner. The second is what happens when those memories are handed to other ears. Suddenly the same fragments acquire different emotional temperatures. A voice that seemed incidental can become ominous; a mechanical sound can acquire rhythm; an apparently empty stretch can suddenly feel charged with expectation.

The title therefore works on several levels. The ear is “thieving” because it takes without permission, but there is nothing particularly criminal about the act. Listening itself is a form of involuntary collecting. We carry around sounds we never consciously decided to remember: the noise of a particular room, an engine heard at night, a voice from a distant apartment, rain against a window whose location we have forgotten. Eventually these fragments become part of the internal furniture.

There is something quietly moving about hearing Ferrari reopen this archive at this stage of her life. The project does not romanticise memory or pretend that preservation means keeping everything unchanged. Quite the opposite: "L’oreille Voleuse" suggests that a sound becomes alive again only when someone is willing to disturb it.

That is why the Ishibashi/O’Rourke version is so important. It demonstrates that an archive is not necessarily a cemetery. It can be a playground, provided one is careful with the ghosts, and there are plenty of them here.

What makes the record remarkable is its refusal to separate composition from listening. Ferrari listens to the world, records it, remembers it and rearranges it; Ishibashi and O’Rourke listen to that rearrangement and produce another. The listener then enters the chain, hearing both versions and inevitably constructing a third in the imagination.

Nobody owns the final piece. The ear has already stolen it.