Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental composer, improvisor, sound artist and video artist researching ancient soundscapes and climate memory, geological listening and sensory worlds, history and more-than-human timescales.
Her work is motivated by questions like: what can we learn about our rapidly changing world—and our relationships with other living things, with our environments, with ourselves--by finding new ways to listen? How can tuning our attention to new ways of listening help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our planet?
Rigby works with live instrumentation, seismological technologies, expanded cinema and field recordings to expand and entangle our thinking about ritual and breathing, listening and resonance, deep time and sense of place. She researches experimental listening as a means of understanding our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone.
Rigby brings together art and science to research seismological listening, infinite sustain, spatial sound, infrasonic worlds, past planets, and our place in time. She blends prepared pipe organ, prepared piano, extended viola techniques, geological and oceanic field recordings, transducers, geophones and live electronics to sculpt immersive soundscapes that explore ancient landscapes. She explores different ways of listening to our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone—to ask questions like:
Where are we?
When are we?
How can infrasonic listening help us hear the secret language of stone? What does a sea cave’s memory sound like? What happens when we bring a millions-of-years old cave into dialogue with the silent thunder of a pipe organ’s lowest stops? When we bring the language of rocks into conversation with the language of a piano, when field recordings and a piano start to talk to one another? What is it like to listen to a piano listen?
Rigby’s site-specific performances in resonant spaces like cathedrals and sea caves blur the boundaries between ancient planetary history and contemporary ritual to ask: what happens when we offer our attention to materials and timescales far bigger and older than ourselves, to resonances that make our bones hum? When we bring art and science into musical dialogue, and start to hear things we couldn’t hear before? When we shift our attention to new spectrums of listening?
And how might infrasonic and geological listening help liberate our imaginations from the present moment, allowing us to speculate on what might have been, and what might be?
To fever dream about not just listening to history, but shaping it?
Julia Edith Rigby (b. 1990, USA) has performed on The Great Organs at FCCLA in Los Angeles (Resonance Collective Golden Thread Concert Series, 2026), the NUUC organ in Pasadena (Open Gate Concert Series, 2026), the Mount Allison University Chapel organ in New Brunswick (Sappyfest, 2024), The Church / Art House organ in Omaha (2023) and the Immanuel Presbyterian Church organ in Los Angeles. She has performed at The Chapel in Seattle (2026), 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), the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023), and Grand Central Art Center during her solo exhibition Fever Dream in 2024.
She was recently awarded a fellowship at Cycladic Arts in Greece.
Rigby’s 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. She 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.