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 thinks about lithic histories, the stories of rocks that have borne witness to our collective past and to the processes that shaped our planet and who we are. She explores entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and ecology, history and acoustical architecture, deep time and planetary change.
Rigby’s compositions contemplate relationships among sensory worlds and sense of place, climate memory and resonance, seismological sensors and lithic listening.
What happens to our understandings of care, worldmaking, and natural history when we expand our understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans, or the resonance of stone?
What happens when we bring imagination, deep listening, and deep time into conversation?
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? To contemplate loss and transformation, weathering, ancient landscapes and soundscapes, living fossils, past planets and the climate crisis, our place in time?
Rigby works at the interstices of sound art, video art, improvisation and installation to create immersive and interactive performance experiences. She queers the boundaries of pipe organ and prepared piano, scientific instrumentation and site-specific performance to pull sound, vibration, resonance and geological stories into relation. She experiments with extended viola techniques and field recordings, welded brass bodies and found objects, seismic sensors and transducers to activate new listening practices. Her site-specific performances in cathedrals and sea caves ask questions like: what happens when experimental lutherie transforms a sea caves into a walk-in cello? What entanglements can we explore among acoustic and environmental phenomena?
How can geophones open our ears and minds to planetary histories?
How can pipe organs open our range of perception to the possibilities of non-cochlear listening, to a world of bone conduction and vibration?
What happens when we explore attention and interconnection in the presence of rocks, or marine invertebrates, or living fossils like deep sea-dwelling hagfish?
How can art help us explore new possibilities for scientific sensors, new possibilities for sensing our planet? New listening ecologies?
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’s work is a call to community. Her audience-activated performances explore listening as an expression of care, attention, and imagination. They blur the boundaries between perception and technology, ancient planetary history and contemporary collective ritual. Viewers / listeners transmogrify into fellow performers. Her outdoor operas-in-the-round cultivate attunement to our surroundings as well as to one another. Through her site-responsive performances in resonant spaces, Rigby researches the acoustical signatures of human and more-than-human architectures, transforming historical buildings into instruments and reactive artistic collaborators.
Her performances create places for communal listening and communal composition. Interweaving interactive scores, field recordings, instrumental improvisation and seismological technologies, they create new acoustical commons for strangers to become collaborators in the co-creation of new social experiences.
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.
“The album’s opening piece is a massive 30-minute opus for organ that demonstrates its startling power. Then, in a series of short pieces dedicated to sea creatures, Rigby focuses on the ways that animals experience the world, sometimes in ways beyond the human sensorium: bats echolocating, sea stars walking on glass, hagfish feeding, and octopuses exploring. The juxtaposition of this wide selection of wild critters raises questions about who and what we share the earth with—where are the limits of our experience of the world, and how might we learn from other ways of being?” —Matthew Blackwell, “Best Field Recordings on July 2025,” Bandcamp
