Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental composer and sound artist who thinks about our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. She is curious about lithic listening and lithic histories, the stories of rocks that have witnessed our collective past and the forces that shaped our planet. She researches entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, climate memory and geological listening, sonic architectures and resonance, planetary change and sense of place, sensory worlds and sense of time. Rigby’s compositions and performances hybridize geological field recordings and live instrumentation with electrical processing and video-based storytelling. She uses rocks and geophones as polyphonic performance instruments to create musical landscapes that explore ancient landscapes.
Rigby improvises with pipe organ, prepared piano, extended viola techniques, stones, scientific instrumentation, field recordings, live electronics and moving imagery to take community-activated performance on a deep dive into deep time and explore questions like: what stories can we learn from the rocks that exist—as they have for millennia--beneath the places we gather? How can listening to rocks help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our planet?
What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world—and our relationships with other living things, with ourselves--by finding new ways to think about listening?
And how can listening help us imagine new futures in times of uncertainty?
Rigby works at the interstices of sound art, video art, improvisation and site-specific installation to create immersive, interactive and multisensory performances exploring care, attention, imagination, and planetary histories and futurities. She works with seismic technologies to make performances that are shaped by their surroundings and audiences in a state of constant evolution, and to transform the venue itself into an instrument and artistic collaborator. Her performances pull questions about sound, vibration, resonance and geological stories into relation and ask: how can art help us explore new possibilities for scientific sensors, new possibilities for sensing our planet? Her site-specific performances in resonant spaces like cathedrals and sea caves explore questions like: what happens when we listen to a pipe organ breathing? What happens when experimental lutherie transmogrifies a sea cave into a walk-in cello? What happens when we listen to a cave with a geophone, when we hear a rock hum? How can geological listening help liberate our imaginations from the present moment, allowing us to speculate on what might have been, and what might be? To dream about not just listening to history, but shaping it?
Rigby’s work is a call to community. Her performances blur the boundaries between perception and technology, ancient planetary history and contemporary collective ritual. They create places for communal listening and communal composition. Interweaving interactive scores, field recordings, instrumental improvisation and seismic technologies, they create new acoustical commons for strangers to become collaborators in the co-creation of new soundscapes and new social experiences. Inviting conversation around ancient soundscapes, past planets and our place in time, they cultivate attunement to our surroundings as well as to one another.
Julia Edith Rigby (b. 1990, USA) has performed at 316Centro in CDMX (2025), The Chapel in Seattle (2025), Heidi Duckler Dance in Los Angeles (2024), LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), the Toulouse Theater in New Orleans (2023), Sappyfest in New Brunswick (2024) and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). Her work has been featured twice on Bandcamp’s Best Field Recordings. She is a recipient of artist grants from the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, Arts New Brunswick, the Center for Cultural Innovation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Rigby was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. She has been an artist in residence at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, GlogauAIR and others. Rigby has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rotterdam and Berlin. Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020), where she was a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the Fay Nelson Award.
