Sea Cave Breathing

Release Date: 02/28/25

Details

Julia Edith Rigby’s new opera Sea Cave Breathing features pipe organ, piano, viola, vocals, brass instrumentation and field recordings.

Sea Cave Breathing is a vibrant experimentation with resonant space, string harmonics, soniferous bodies, dissonance, and pipe organ polyphonies.

The composition tells the story of a sea cave. Rigby spent the past five years working with a sea cave located forty miles south of Los Angeles, where she bowed ephemeral wire sound sculptures to transmogrify the sea cave into a soniferous body.

The sea cave is a site for thinking about physical and acoustical architecture, sonic and material degeneration, shifting seascapes, resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, and entanglements among humans and more-than-humans. It is a place to think about local and global environmental phenomena and how they intertwine. And it is a place to think about growth and decay, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities, deep time and breathing.

Pipe organs too are sites from which to contemplate breathing.

Rigby works with pipe organs to create sites for communal listening and sounding activations. While recording the pipe organ elements for this composition at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska, Rigby invited the audience to physically interact with the pipe organ and to find new ways to experience its seismic and spectral sound signature through tactile and movement-based experimentation. The community-activated performance reconfigured the listeners as performers, creating an ephemeral acoustical commonage, an ecological system of improvisational give and take.

Migrating birds, sea stars and sea caves enter into conversation with the instrumentation. By bringing the sounds of sea caves local to Los Angeles into conversation with sounds from farther afield, the opera aims to cultivate relational thinking about geological time, ecological systems and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales.

Sea Cave Breathing asks questions about listening / sounding as social practice, resonance and vibration, rupture and repair, degeneration and regeneration. What are the relationships between the history of a site—a sea cave, a pipe organ--and its resonant qualities, its acoustical signature? What are some relationships among ecological, material and sonic decay? Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site’s resonance 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--by finding new ways to think about listening?

Rigby’s composition features field recordings of hissing beetles, ambulating sea stars and echolocating bats. By rendering audible the inaudible, the project brings us into relation with sounds that usually exist outside of our ranges of perception.

The opera 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—echoes of the Jurassic period--reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance. They also reveal a world of present-day insect population collapse. 

What happens when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? Can finding different ways to listen nurture new means of sensing and understanding the world around us? What does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a 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?

 

 Link to purchase the album here

Credits

Audio mastered by Michael Southard.

Vocals performed by Mary Edwards, Leah Crosby, and Jacob Frost. Trumpet performed by Kafele Williams at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska (“Kafele and the Pipe Organ”). Trumpet performed by Chris Ryan Williams and violin by Zosha Warpeha (“A Sea Bird Swallows the Pipe Organ Power Light”).

Organ music performed by Julia Edith Rigby on the historical pipe organs at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, the Mount Allison University Chapel in New Brunswick, and The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska. Piano recorded by Julia Edith Rigby at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. Viola, 1978 Yamaha Electone B55 electric organ, and sampling keyboard performed by Julia Edith Rigby. Sound sculpture (welded from sousaphones and found brass objects) performed by Julia Edith Rigby. Field recordings feature radios, tape cassette recorders, starfish tube feet, sea urchins, bats, beetles, penguins, a Swainson’s Thrush and The Wrinkles in Time marching band in Omaha, Nebraska).

Special thanks to Grand Central Center for Art in Santa Ana, California for your support in the beginning phases of this work, to Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts for offering me the time and space to begin recording this album, and to Sitka Center for Art and Ecology for offering me the time and space to edit. Thank you to Okada Sculpture and Ceramics Facility in Omaha, Nebraska for sharing welding materials so that I could fabricate the brass sound sculpture of assorted sousaphones and horns (which is featured on the track “Foghorns.”

Thank you to the OneBeat Fellowship and Found Sound Nation for introducing me to an incredible community of musicians, and CAMPBIENT for expanding my sense of play in the world of sound art. Thank you to The Church Art House in Omaha, SAPPYFEST and Mount Allison University in New Brunswick and Immanuel Presbyterian Church for sharing your pipe organs. Thank you Graeme Patterson for sharing your sound studio and your 1978 Yamaha Electone B55 electric organ, which you found abandoned on the street with its power cord cut and somehow resuscitated back to its former glory. And thank you to all my friends and family for all your support along the way.

 

Track List