Lithic Breathing

Sea caves are windows into our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. They’ve borne witness to our collective past, to the processes that shaped our planet and who we are.

Sea caves and pipe organs breathe by apertures opening and closing.

This is a story of the ways they can expand and entangle our thinking about breathing, listening, resonance and time.

Geophones and lithic lutherie open our ears to the resonant signatures of more-than-human architectures, and to the echoes of deep time.

What does a sea cave’s memory sound like?

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Details

The score experiments with resonant space, vibrational architecture, string harmonics, dissonance, pipe organ polyphonies, and seismic rock recordings. Salvaged brass animals were welded into new amalgamations and used as key weights and sound sculptures. The score features prepared pipe organ (activated with geophones and contact mics), viola, field recordings, prepared piano (plucked, keyed and activated with sea cave stones, welded key weights, electronics, seaweed, bells, Ebows, geophones and more).

2025

Credits and Gratitude

Bats recorded by Ben Kinsley at Campbient Residency, Manchester State Park, WA 2025.

Audio mastered by Michael Southard.

Organ music performed on the pipe organs at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.

Special thanks to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Bodega Marine Laboratory and Chapman University, where I recorded sounds made by hagfish, sea urchins, sea stars and more.

Thank you to the Experimental Music + Sound Art Fellowship and the Okada Sculpture & Ceramics Facility at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

The outdoor sound sculpture installations were temporary and left no trace on the environment.