Finley Wegener: ‘Hearing Now’ at Floating Land

Hearing Now is an ongoing project by Finley Wegener that explores natural places through site-responsive, durational experimental music performance. These performances engage interdisciplinary techniques of environmental monitoring, sound installation, and improvised performance to reveal, amplify, and decorate natural processes and soundscapes. It not only involves the natural world but collaborates with it. Hidden sounds, revealed through a distributed sound system, allow audiences to experience the minutiae of ecology – to uncover further depths of aesthetics to be found in the environment.

For Floating Land 2025, I produced a series of five weekly two-hour performance installations on the shores of Lake Cootharaba. I strove to embed each performance within the pristine natural surroundings of the lake, using an off-grid sound system and a custom made weather station to turn wind, temperature, and light into soothing ambient music. Alongside this, I performed long-form soundscapes that responded to birds, animals, and sounds in the environment. This series was a transformative experience – I gathered audience feedback as voicemails and responded to what people engaged with throughout the festival, incorporating new perspectives and evolving the work with each iteration. This iterative development will contribute greatly to my ongoing research at the University of the Sunshine Coast exploring how music performance can connect audiences to environments and ecology.