Release Date: 02/28/25

Details

Julia Edith Rigby’s new opera Sea Cave Breathing features pipe organ, piano (plucked, bowed and played), viola, vocals, brass instrumentation, field recordings and noise elements.

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 collaborating 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. It is a place from which to think about sonic and material decomposition, growth and decay, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities, deep time and breathing.

The resonance of the sea cave—activated by Rigby’s sound sculptures and cello bows—speaks to the ways that geologic time shapes physical space and acoustical range. When we hear the cave’s resonant signature being activated by the sound sculpture, we are listening to the cave’s acoustical anatomy as well as its history. We are hearing the resonance of millennia of climatic phenomena acting upon an organism.

The sea cave tunnels deep into a decaying cliff, its dark channels winding far beyond the eyes’ reach. Sounding the sea cave helps us understand its spatiality, but only ambiguously. We hear the resonant growls of the cave being activated by bow and wire, but these sounds offer us an uncertain sketch at best. This element of uncertainty—played out in a cave that has been sculpted over millennia and continues to be sculpted by increasingly erratic climatic phenomena—echoes the uncertainties of the climate crisis.

The sea cave is anything but static and untouched; it is in flux, and the fragility of our climate future and the fragility of this eroding cave are in daily conversation with every tidal ebb and flow bearing microplastic-dense, acidified, and every-warming waters, every atmospheric river event. This project explores a radical intimacy with the sea cave, the planet, and ourselves.

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, metamorphosis (of body, stone and place) and entanglements among humans and more-than-humans. It is a place to think about local and global environmental phenomena and how they intertwine. 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. They are gilled, multi-esophageal creatures that wheeze, hum, sigh, even scream.

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, she 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. By leaning back-to-back with the pipe organ, the audience could experience more-than-human means of listening, moving beyond the realm of cochlear vibration into the realm of bone conduction. Taking cues from elephants—who listen to infrasonic communications 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 performance aimed to cultivate new ways of listening via flesh contact with the organ body. We listened with our backs, our ribcages, even the bones of our faces. The community-activated performance reconfigured the listeners as performers, creating an ephemeral acoustical commonage, an ecological system of improvisational give and take. The experiment pulled questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another.

Migrating birds, sea stars, penguins, frogs 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 interspecies sonics. Field recordings of hissing beetles, ambulating sea urchins and echolocating bats are interwoven throughout. 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.

When we hear the rasping sounds of hagfish feeding, we are hearing the animals scraping their rows of keratinous teeth on squid and fish meat. We are hearing the sounds of a basal, benthic species who scavenges the sea floor by sense of smell and touch. We are listening to an animal that hasn’t changed much from the Late Carboniferous period, around 310 million years ago, a time before dinosaurs. We are listening to a living fossil. Listening to living fossils brings us into relation with long time.

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? What does it mean to find new ways to listen, to pay attention, in these uncertain times? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of consciousness, a kind of political act?

Album Link

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”).

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”). Many 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 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