Lithic Breathing is an experimental art film that explores our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. The project explores sea caves and pipe organs, and the ways that they can expand and entangle our thinking about ritual and breathing, listening and resonance, planetary change and deep time. Geophones, organs, viola, piano, stones, bells, and field recordings come together in the making of a score that carves space for memory, imagination and encounter.
More About The Project
Lithic Breathing is an experimental art film that explores our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. The project explores sea caves and pipe organs, and the ways that they can expand and entangle our thinking about ritual and breathing, listening and resonance, planetary change and deep time. Geophones, organs, viola, piano, stones, bells, and field recordings come together in the making of a score that carves space for memory, imagination and encounter.
In the heart of Los Angeles, California breathes a pipe organ featuring over 4000 pipes.
Just south of the city breathe sea caves carved from ancient rock.
The caves have borne witness to our collective past, to the processes that shaped our planet and who we are. Ancient geological and oceanic forces birthed these caves, and their configuration speaks to those forces. These rocks are keepers of climate memory.
What does a sea cave’s memory sound like?
Pipe organs too are relics of ancient worlds. Like sea caves, their breathing is a matter of apertures opening and closing.
This is a story about sea caves and pipe organs, and it is a story about the primeval interconnected forces that molded our world. It is a story that begins millions of years ago, with the emergence of these rock formations during the Miocene epoch roughly fifteen million years ago. This was an era of mastodons and megalodons, colossal sharks as long as school buses. This was the time of Livyatan melvillei, a prehistoric sperm whale whose namesake comes from the biblical sea monster Leviathan.
These rocks are storytellers. They have seen the coming and going of all the planets that have ebbed and flowed since then on this spinning rock we call Earth. They’ve witnessed the Holocene, the Pliocene, the Miocene. So many worlds have blossomed and withered during their existence.
The rocks have borne witness to planetary change, loss and renewal, time and transmogrification. Once upon a sea cave, these rocks saw a time when grizzly bears roamed California’s coastline, tunneling through the carcasses of beached whales. They saw the time of three-toed horses, ancient camels and Smilodons.
What is it like listen to the world through a fifteen-million-year-old filter of rock?
A cave’s unique acoustics is shaped by its unique architecture, which is a product of deep time’s mark-making, an echo of geological memory. Geophones and experimental lutherie open our ears to the vibratory acoustics of more-than-human architectures, and to the echoes of deep time. They take us on a journey through the acoustical landscapes of sea caves, and invite us to listen to and think about rocks in completely new ways.
A geophone is a sensor that detects low-frequency ground vibrations and converts them into electrical signals. When we listen to a sea cave through a geophone, we are listening to stone and we are listening through stone. We are listening to the sea through a filter of ancient matter. We are listening to the world through the remnants of past planets.
Thinking about sea caves brings us into relation with deep time, with a planetary pace. Listening to sea caves—whether with bow and wire or with a geophone--brings us into intimate relation with climate memory. What does it mean to listen deeply in times of climate crisis?
Sea caves carry us back into deep time and forward into an uncertain future. They liberate our imaginations from the present moment, allowing us to speculate on what might have been, and what might be. They invite us to fever dream deep into our planet’s mercurial pasts and far forward into potential futurities. We can dream about not just listening to history, but shaping it.
What stories do sea caves have to tell us?
And how can learning these stories help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our planet?
How can lithic listening conjure new upwellings of planetary wonder, new imaginings of possible futures?
What happens when we start to open our ears and minds to cave voice, cave memory, cave time?
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Lithic Breathing features documentation of my work with prepared piano, prepared viola, prepared pipe organ, transducers, geophones, experimental lutherie, and sea cave performances.
The score experiments with resonant space, vibrational architecture, string harmonics, dissonance, pipe organ polyphonies, and seismic rock recordings. Geophones and lithic lutherie open our ears to the resonant signatures of more-than-human architectures, and to the echoes of deep time.
The score features prepared pipe organ (activated with geophones and contact microphones), prepared viola (activated with sea cave stones, transducers, geophones and contact microphones), field recordings (sea caves activated with bow and wire; geophone recordings of sea caves and coastal environments), and prepared piano (plucked, keyed and activated with sea cave stones, welded key weights, electronics, seaweed, bells, viola bows, drum mallets, Ebows, geophones and more).
Salvaged brass animals were welded into new amalgamations and used as key weights and sound sculptures.
For the field recordings, I recorded the sounds of sea caves being transformed into walk-in cellos via bow and wire. I also worked with geophones to record the sounds of sea cave rocks, and hydrophones to record the sounds of tidal hydraulics. Interwoven are field recordings featuring more-than-humans who build their lives around coastal geologies (roosting cormorants, feeding crabs) as well as more-than-humans from further afield who are nevertheless entangled in a web of global relationships.
All outdoor sound sculpture installations were ephemeral and left no trace on the environment.
2025
Album Link
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.
