Image: video still from Fever Dream

OPENING RECEPTION:

Saturday, June 1 2024, 7-10pm

Location: Grand Central Art Center

LIVE PERFORMANCE:

Saturday, June 1, 2024, 7-10 pm

Saturday, July 6, 2024, 7-10 pm

Location: Grand Central Art Center

Viola, brass sound sculpture, pickup mic, contact mic. Live free-improvisational instrumentation mixed with field recordings and amplified, edited sound.

EXHIBTION:

June 1—August 11, 2024

Fever Dream is a feral opera featuring whale sharks and silk moths, golden-headed lion tamarins and desert ants, bristlecone pines and dinoflagellates. The opera invites us to explore entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound, bringing living fossils like hagfish and Przewalksi’s horses into conversation with sea caves and elderflorae, beetles and bats, church bells and pipe organs, brass and string sections. The project explores collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals and environments to imagine futurities which complexify our understandings of sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and possibility.

Acoustical architecture, animal vocalizations, string harmonics, interspecies musical collaboration, resonant space, metamorphosis, dissonance, waste streams, ecotones, multispecies relationships, soniferous bodies and fever dreams are worked into the composition. Eroding sea caves transmogrify into megafaunal breathers. Tortoise exhalations sound the ocarina-like wind sections. Pyrocene-scarred elderflorae shape harmonic structures for the string sections. Percussion arrives via woodpecker bills and sea star feet. Human vocals, amphibian vocals, cathedral bells, wild parrots, and TSA field recordings flesh out the operatics. Pipe organs, violas and brass instruments converse with cicadas and crabs. Meetings with living fossils—Przewalski's horses and hagfish—guide the scores for further instrumentation that explores notions of ancient organisms in relation to ancient landscapes, seascapes, and soundscapes.

Fever Dream conjures a world as lush visually as it is acoustically, where sonic and material decay and regeneration happen at superspeed in kalaidoscopic, ultrachromatic chaos. Butterflies nectar on rotting figs and scorpion fish parade in fluorescent pink. Moving imaginaries featuring blooming cacti, slithering eels, and respiring sharks lay the foundation for acoustical imaginaries which in turn lay the foundation for future imaginaries, worlds which call into question ideas like: what does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with the vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? Where do we end, and where does the world begin? What do those liminal spaces sound like?

The experimental opera hybridizes six-channel moving imagery, multi-channel sound and live improvised instrumentation. As the viewer / listener moves through the space, their movements shape not just their perceptions of the visuals and sounds, but the creation of those visuals (for instance via shadow interaction) and soundscapes. Viewers / listeners are invited to contemplate the ways in which their movements through this space co-create the collective experience.

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, animals and climatic phenomena, the opera expands our human-centered understanding of perception / world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. Wild bats and beetles, sea lions and tortoises, coyotes and hagfish, cicadas and cormorants, marine isopods and bees are among the many animals voicing the score. Piano, viola and pipe organ pieces are arranged with recordings of ant nests and frogs, welded sousaphones and sea storms. Lush jungle bird songs dialogue with cathedral organ drones.

Frog calls were recorded in Californian vernal pools, Midwest ponds, and a Costa Rican cloud forest undergoing climate change-exacerbated amphibian decline. Woodpecker / squirrel / ash recorded in a wildfire burn site in Oregon six months after a firestorm event. Calving glaciers were recorded in Alaska. Beached icebergs were recorded in eastern Greenland, melting and releasing bubble-pops of ancient atmospheres.

Meetings with giant tortoises on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos yielded recordings of the animals breathing, wading and chewing wild guavas. These flutey, whistling reptilian exhalations are nearly ocarina-like, a result of squeezing so much air from such large lungs through two tiny pinpricks for nostrils. Listening to the breathing of these Methuselaen animals puts us into contact with more-than-human timescales. We are listening to the exhalations of an animal that has been eating guavas on this island for well over one hundred years.

Church bells were recorded in Berlin and Oaxaca. Recordings from TSA screenings were arranged for the opening of Act III.

Bugling tule elks—which sound like A string harmonics— guided the creation of compositions with viola harmonics.

Sounds recorded via hydrophone at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute's Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California include the radula of a predacious snail drilling through a mussel shell, a sea urchin walking on glass, and hagfish feeding on decomposing fish. Hungry sea stars were recorded inching across glass bowls, hunting mussels.

Metamorphoses abound. Tree frogs transmogrify into brass bugles, squid into lily flowers, puffins into carrion, pupae into pipe organ pistons. Sea caves and juniper trees transform into cellos. Singing frogs morph into idling bus engines morph into buzzing bees.

The project experiments with expanding our senses of perception to consider different understandings of time, sounding and sensing. When we hear the glassy bells of sea star tube feet, we are hearing those feet walking, tasting and smelling all at once. Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo. Buzzing cicadas reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.

Pipe organ swells, viola harmonics, brass drones and irreverent vocals make sonic speculations of the perceptual worlds of whale sharks and leopard lizards, toadfish and butterflies. The score dreams worlds for a rainbow of queer existences too, from genderfluid fish to gender-free comb jellies and earthworms.

The kangaroo rat film sequence contemplates rat vocalizations, viola harmonics, and the concept of more-than-human communication and worldmaking. Rats communicate in ultrasonic frequencies beyond our human range of hearing. Few studies however have been performed on ultrasonic kangaroo rat vocalizations. The viola elements of this sequence experiment with harmonic tone vibrations and variations to image myriad potential manifestations of these vocalizations if brought down into the realm of audible frequencies. Viola harmonics also guide acoustical imaginings for the sound of a butterfly proboscis sipping nectar.

Field recordings of animal vocalizations are arranged with recordings of local sea caves. Bowing wires stretched across cave mouths allows us to hear a cave’s range of resonance, its unique acoustical architecture. The activations render audible the inaudible, bringing us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. What is the connection between the history of a site and it’s resonant signature? Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site or object’s resonance catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human timescales?

This recording project, called Sea Cave Complex, spans three years’ worth of site-responsive research with sonic and material decay as influenced by shifts in tides, cave apertures, and storm events. One winter, a camera and a zoom microphone were temporarily installed above the mouth of the sea cave from the cliff above, so as to lend insight into a sea torrent from the perspective of a sea cave.

Sea Cave Complex features local sea caves located roughly twenty miles away from the Grand Central Art Center. By bringing local cave sounds into conversation with sounds from places like Greenland, the Galapagos, Los Angeles, and Berlin, the project aims to cultivate relational thinking about socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales. (The installation was temporary and left no trace on the sea caves or the surrounding environment).

Soniferous elderflorae also play into the score. A welded sound sculpture was bowed in the belly of a fire-scarred bristlecone pine tree and sounded, capturing the resonant structure of the tree. When we hear the vibrations of these fibers, we are hearing the acoustical anatomy of a tree, the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena—culminating with a series of sudden climate change-exacerbated firestorm events—acting upon an organism. These acoustical experimentations aim to open our minds to different timescales, to queer socioecological histories and speculative futurities. (The installation was temporary and did not involve touching the tree in any way).

The score experiments with samples from found cassette tapes, which perhaps can be thought of as living fossils. The tapes were recorded over, re-recorded over, and re-re-recorded over in iterative cycles until the tape started to degenerate. The soundscapes of these tapes’ degeneration are woven in with the soundscapes from the sea caves. What is the life cycle of a cassette tape and what does it sound like? Of a sea cave, of climate grief, of a fever dream? What are some relationships among sonic and material decay and degeneration? Among ruptured polyphonies (specifically bioacoustical melodies) and phenologies (seasonal natural phenomena)?

What are new ways of thinking about growth and decay, decomposition and re-composition of everything and anything tellurian? On human timescales (for instance the lifespan of a musical note or a cassette tape)? On larger-than-human timescales (such as the lifespan of a 4000 year old bristlecone pine tree)? On geologic timescales (like a multimillion year old sea cave)? What about listening to geologic processes accelerated? What are some relationships among time, climate change, and listening?

How might listening to growth and decay on larger-than-human timescales influence our thinking about phenomena? How can listening to a sea cave catalyze new means of listening to deep time, of listening across millennia? Of listening to the echoes of thousands of years’ cycles of rupture and repair, degeneration and regeneration? What is the life cycle of a sea cave, what does it sound like? How might storm events, erosion events, and sea level rise factor into that soundscape?

The opera includes recordings of sea caves as well as recordings from stone cathedrals. How might thinking about these resonant spaces in relation to one another help us recontextualize our historical understandings of each site across a breadth of timescales?

Ocean soundscapes were recorded via hydrophone during an atmospheric river phenomenon in California. They are transmissions from coastal sites undergoing climate change-exacerbated storm events.

A bulk of the oceanic video and audio featured in the project was collected during various atmospheric river storm events—in real time underwater as well as afterwards in the form of washed up detritus and decay, like beached leopard sharks and sea stars. Part of the opera includes a dirge for a beached leopard shark, which eventually transmogrifies into a TSA airport fugue. Fossorial soundscapes were recorded via contact mics placed in soil to hear the sonic worlds of beetle larvae metamorphosizing, worms feeding on decay and ants tunneling nests.

Many of the sounds and visuals in Fever Dream were created with the sound sculpture Brass Tide, which can be viewed in the main gallery space. Sourcing material from traumatized instruments and brass objects salvaged from waste streams and flea markets, Rigby welded the piece in the Okada Sculpture and Ceramic Facility at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. She amalgamated four sousaphones sourced from different regions of the country and perforated their bells and goosenecks with her welding torch to create a range of new sonic possibilities for the instruments.

Rigby performed live with the sound sculpture along with Zosha Warpeha and Chris Williams at LOW END in the fall in Omaha, Nebraska. The reflective nature of the brass sousaphone bells lends an interactive quality to the work, creating spaces for viewers to see themselves reflected in the bells. Brass is sensitive to fingerprints and marks made by viewers’ hands, which lends another layer of interactivity to the material. This interactive quality is activated not just visually but also acoustically, during the live performance in which the sounds made by the audience are picked up by microphones attached to the sousaphone bells and fed into an ephemeral feedback loop.

Elements of the sound sculpture were installed in the ocean and activated by human breath and waves. Oceanic collaborations were recorded and arranged in the score for Fever Dream. As with the sea cave and juniper tree installations, this installation was temporary and left no trace on the environment.

The sound sculpture was then installed in the Grand Central Art Center for the opening of Fever Dream. Because the brass is so highly reactive, it oxidizes touch marks left by passing visitors, making their fingerprints pop and lending an interactive quality to the work that is further amplified by the metal’s reflective nature.

Pipe organ soundscapes and video footage from the performance Gill Valves are also present in this piece. Gill Valves was a community-activated performance at The Church / Art Space in Omaha, Nebraska, in which audience members were invited to sit back-to-back with a pipe organ and experience sound on a seismic scale. We experimented with pressing our heads to the pipe organ body, with listening through the bones of our face.

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Gill Valves emerged from Rigby’s research with swell sharks at Omaha's Henry Doorly Aquarium. Rigby spent her residency watching the sharks, playing viola for them from the walkways above their tanks, and learning about their breathing mechanisms as a means of finding new ways to imagine and re-imagine the pipe organ. Thinking about shark gills and flue pipes, about inhalation and exhalation, generated recontextualizations of pipe organ mechanics and sound generation.

Research with the pipe organ expanded to include other animals and their sensory worlds. The project experimented with more-than-human means of listening, with moving beyond the realm of cochlear vibration into the realm of bone conduction. Taking cues from elephants—who communicate via low-frequency rumbles heard through the pacinian corpuscles of their fatty, sensitive feet—and baleen whales—who communicate long distance via low-frequency calls and amplify infrasonic sounds via their unique skull morphologies—the project aimed to cultivate new ways of listening via flesh contact with the organ body.

Gill Valves was an experiment in pipe organ mechanics, performance, sound, video, and multi-channel moving image installation to create a space for exploring phenomena, perception and listening / sounding as social practice. The project transformed the pipe organ into a commonage. People were invited to engage with the pipe organ, to contribute to the soundscape via their movements and interactions, to contemplate sound as spatial force, pipe organ as proto-subwoofer, and sensory sensitivity in relation to movement. People were invited to move freely and observe the ways our spatial movements shaped not just our perception of the soundscape but also the very nature and creation of that ephemeral soundscape. The project was a means of tuning into our surroundings as well as to one another.

Gill Valves catalyzed transformations by which the viewers / listeners became the performers, creating a space for collective listening and collective improvisation. How might these kinds of actions with a pipe organ—this megafaunal, multi-esophageal screamer—create space for social practice, for feeling our ways through collective grief processes and political actions? For radical noticing and regenerative world-making? How can we bring these conversations with pipe organs into relationships with more-than-humans and more-than-human worlds? How might these relationships catalyze new means of of careful listening and strengthening systems of care?

Many of the viola elements in Fever Dream were recorded during a performance this fall at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska and hybridize live free improvisational instrumentation with amplified edited sound.

Field recordings were gathered at the UC Davis Waste Water Treatment Plant. Sounds of bulldozers crushing garbage, shorebirds calling from the nearby sludge fields where they probe for food, and songbirds lend voice to the site’s ephemeral sound signature. These sounds are invitations to think about waste streams, matter flow, sonic and material decomposition and re-composition. A surprising diversity of biota reveals itself through these recordings, including ravens with their immense library of vocalizations, lizards crawling under scrap metal piles, and hawks calling out from their aerial rodent patrols. The sound recordings of waste being moved around are invitations to think about ecological systems, time and objecthood. How do objects break chronology? What do these ruptures sound like?

Additional field recordings were sampled from contact mics picking up happenings in subterranean environments. Insects and interstitial organisms dwelling in the dark depths underneath various Los Angeles streetscapes were recorded and woven into this composition. Soil recordings taken from the crust of a seasonal alkaline lake during a PLAYA artist residency in eastern Oregon. These dry soils are home to fairy shrimp, which hatch during the rainy season in cloud-dense quantities. What is the soundscape of a lake bed gone dormant? Of a lake bed wakened?

Fever Dream opened June 1 with a live performance. The performance hybridized live free improvisational instrumentation—leading with viola and the sound sculpture Brass Tide—live audience soundings, and amplified edited sound (featuring the field recordings described in this essay), yielding ephemeral, site-specific feedback loops. The sound sculpture was activated with contact microphones, vibrations and percussion, bowing, blowing and subwoofers. As Rigby performed percussion and cello bowing / shredding on the sound sculpture, loose pieces broke off and fell, adding to the sonic and material debris field. The residue of this sonic / material shedding process can be viewed underneath and around the sound sculpture.

Fever Dream came together with the work of many musicians. Rigby played the parts for pipe organ, piano, viola, found electronic keyboard, radio, and cassette recorder. Kafele Williams played the trumpet elements,. The Wrinkles in Time Brass Band played horns and percussion. Mary Edwards, Leah Crosby and Leora Malka contributed vocals.

Many thanks to Grand Central Art Center and Cal State University, Fullerton for supporting this project.