Nature & Animals Quote by John Hench

What sounds like a throwaway anecdote is really a small manifesto about how “background” art refuses to stay in the background. Hench starts with the deadest, most commercial image possible: music “supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant.” That’s ambience as product, sound designed to be ignored. Then he flips it with the phrase “Something would happened” (the slightly off grammar almost helps): the moment isn’t planned, polished, or proprietary. It’s an interruption.

The birds are the punchline and the proof. A “little jazz thing” isn’t just birdsong; it’s improvisation, call-and-response, the social intelligence of sound. One bird initiates, another “answers.” Hench is smuggling in a whole theory of creativity: art isn’t a one-way broadcast from a machine (or an institution, or a studio system). It’s relational. It provokes imitation, variation, dialogue. The tape can pipe in mood; it can’t participate.

Given Hench’s life as an artist who worked inside large-scale entertainment and design systems, the subtext lands with extra bite. He’s describing the recurring miracle that happens even in controlled environments: nature, or human attention, finds a way to riff back. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the idea that culture is something we consume passively. Real music, like real art, is contagious behavior. It makes other living things answer.