Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental composer and sound artist who thinks about our resonating world. She is curious about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and climate, architectural acoustics and history. Her projects explore relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, ecology and empathy, climate grief and climate futurities.
Rigby works at the interstices of sound art, performance, improvisation and installation. She experiments with prepared pipe organ and prepared piano, viola, field recordings, contact microphones, noise, sea caves and seismological equipment to activate new ways of listening. Her performances pull questions about collectivity, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of care, worldmaking, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? How are our lives entangled? What can we learn from thinking about relationships among sound and ecosystem health, resonance and geologic time, listening and more-than-human intelligence? How can listening help us reimagine new ecologies and interspecies futures?
Rigby researches relationships among resonance and vibration, rupture and repair, attention and care, degeneration and regeneration. What is the connection between the history of a site and its resonance, its acoustical signature? Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site’s resonance—that of a sea cave for instance, or a cathedral—-catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human timescales or even accelerating geological timescales? 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, to pay attention? What does it mean to find new ways to listen—for example via vibration, tactility, and bone conduction—and to pay attention in these uncertain times?
Rigby’s live improvised music and multi-sensorial, community-activated performances explore the edges of our perception. They cultivate attunement to our surroundings as well as to one another. Her projects range from experimental operas on city rooftops to interactive and site-specific audiovisual performances in resonant spaces. They incorporate seismological technology in ways that reconfigure viewers as performers.
Working with geophones to transform historic sites into ephemeral, collaborative and community-activated instruments, Rigby creates acoustical commonages for coming together to sound and to listen. She transforms historic buildings and their visitors into fellow collaborators. She hybridizes harmonic textures on viola, pipe organ drones, field recordings and expansive, multi-channel moving visuals. Her immersive performances interweave strings, piano, pipe organ and field recordings gathered from animals, plants, sea caves and subterranean realms. Collaborating with millennia-year-old sea caves, bats, beetles and sea stars, Rigby composes vibrant sound works that pull us into the sonic and sensory worlds of more-than-humans and catalyze careful listening on local and global scales. She transforms sea caves into walk-in cellos, sites from which to contemplate cave memory, deep time and deep listening and to ask:
What happens when we enter into dialogue with a sea cave?
What does it mean to listen to a sea cave breathe? And how can this kind of listening re-shape our understanding of the world? Can listening to sea caves cultivate a sense of lithic empathy?
Can deep listening to sea caves cultivate a sense of expanded intimacy with deep time?
Rigby queers the potentials of prepared pipe organ, listens to waste fields, welds salvaged brass instruments and recycled brass objects into blasting foghorns, and renders audible interstitial subterranean realms via geophones. Her works explore the sonic signatures of resonant sites, ecological systems and environmental phenomena. They make audible the inaudible, bringing us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. Her performances ask: what does it mean to listen deeply in times of climate crisis? Can paying attention manifest as a political act?
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, Kala Art Institute, 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
