Fever Dream Opera
Video Opera
2024
The project explores entanglements among organisms, oceanscapes and landscapes, and sound.
Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, and wild animals, the project brings us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard, expanding our human-centered understanding of perception / world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans.
Field recordings include wild bats, scarab beetles, cerambycid beetles, bees, Galapagos sea lion pups and tortoises, tree frogs and crickets, cicadas and sea storms, soniferous fish and marine isopods.
Ocean soundscapes recorded via hydrophone during an atmospheric river storm event in California. Frogs recorded in Californian vernal pools, Midwest ponds, and a Costa Rican cloud forest undergoing climate change-exacerbated amphibian decline. Woodpecker and squirrel duet, forest fire ash recorded in a wildfire burn site in Oregon six months after an unseasonal firestorm event. Iceberg soundscapes recorded in eastern Greenland. Tortoise recorded breathing and eating wild guava on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos. Church bells recorded in Berlin. Recordings of bugling tule elks in northern California guided the compositions with viola harmonics.
Sounds recorded at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute's Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California include the radula of a predacious snail radula grinding down a mussel shell, a sea urchin walking on glass, and hagfish feeding on decomposing fish.
The project experiments with expanding our perception to consider different understandings of time, worlding and perception. For instance, starfish tube feet recordings (collected at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute's Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California) are also recordings of starfish eyes, which are located on the tips of their arms. Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo. The sound of cicadas buzzing reveals a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.
Many of the sounds and visuals in this piece were created with the sound sculpture Brass Tide (https://juliaedithrigby.com/brass-tide), welded from traumatized instruments and brass objects salvaged from waste streams and flea markets and performed with Zosha Warpeha and Chris Williams at LOW End at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska this fall.
Soundscapes and video footage from the performance Gill Valves are also present in this piece. Gill Valves was performed at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska and features a pipe organ. This was a community-activated performance, in which audience members were invited to interact with the pipe organ, to contribute to the soundscape, to sit back-to-back with the organ and experience sound via bone conduction on a seismic scale
Gill Valves experiments with more-than-human means of listening—moving beyond the ears and into the realm of bone listening— taking cues from elephants (who communicate via low-frequency rumbles heard through their fatty, sensitive feet) and baleen whales (who communicate long distance via low-frequency calls and amplify infrasonic sounds via their unique skull morphologies).
Piano, viola, and vocals also feature in the opera. The viola elements 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.
Kafele Williams played the trumpet elements, and The Wrinkles in Time Brass Band played horns and percussion.
A bulk of the oceanic video and audio featured in the project was collected during atmospheric river storm events—in real time underwater as well as afterwards in the form of washed up detritus and decay.
Animal vocalizations are paired with sonified sea caves. These sea cave recordings aim to open our ears to relationships between resonance and history, sculptural processes and geologic time. Various cave sites are temporarily activated by wires stretched across the interiors of caves and activated with cello bows so as to better hear their resonant capacities, or acoustical architectures,. The activations render inaudible the inaudible, bringing us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. This recording project, called Sea Cave Complex, spans three years worth of experimentation with sonic and material decay, influenced by shifts in tides, cave apertures, and storm events.
Sea Cave Complex features local sea caves located only about 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.
An ancient juniper tree also plays into the score. Visuals and sounds recorded from the project Soniferous Juniper are featured throughout the installation. The project transformed a 1200+ year old juniper tree growing just two hours north of the Grand Central Art Center into a living cello. Copper wires stretched across a fire-carved doorway in the tree are activated with a cello bow, with the tree itself acting as the resonant body for the wire's’ vibrations.
The cellulose fibers of the tree contribute to a highly-individualized sonic signature. When we hear the vibrations of these fibers—still living but heavily scarred by climate-exacerbated wildfire events—we are hearing the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena acting upon an organism. The installation was temporary and left no trace on the tree or the environment.
These two projects experiment with thinking about growth and decay, decomposition and re-composition—of a musical note, of a juniper tree, of a sea cave—on larger-than-human and even geological timescales. What does listening to growth and decay on larger-than-human timescales do for our thinking about phenomena?
Many thanks to The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska for lending their pipe organ, and to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts for supporting this project.
