Release Date: 02/28/25

Details

Julia Edith Rigby’s new opera Sea Cave Breathing celebrates our resonating world. The album features pipe organ, piano (plucked, bowed and played), viola, vocals, brass instrumentation, field recordings and noise elements. The opera is a vibrant experimentation with resonant space, vibrational architecture, string harmonics, soniferous bodies, dissonance, and pipe organ polyphonies.

The opera 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 sound sculptures to transmogrify the sea cave into a roaring instrument. The sound sculptures consisted of welded brass objects and piano wire, which when bowed transformed the sea cave into a walk-in cello.

Sea caves are sites for thinking about physical and acoustical architecture, cave memory, sonic and material degeneration, shifting seascapes, resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, uncertain futures, soniferous bodies, 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.

If the ocean is our planet life support system and our greatest ally against the climate crisis, then what are ways to think about sea caves? Sea caves are sound sculptures that give voice to and are voiced by the ever-shifting seascape. What do we have to learn by taking the time to pay attention to these sites, to listen? How can learning the stories of sea caves help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our oceans? Fusing instrumentation, sound sculpture and speculative worldbuilding, the project weaves multiple perspectives of this sea cave’s histories, carrying us at once back into deep time and forward into an uncertain future. What does a sea cave’s memory sound like?

The resonance of the sea cave—activated by Rigby’s sound sculptures and cello bows—speaks to the ways that geologic time and tidal hydraulics shape 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. Vibrational architecture opens our minds to geologic forces and geologic time. Reverberations, echoes, decays all speak to a cave’s material and spatial conditions, sonic histories, and potential futurities.

We can think of sea caves as walk-in cellos or cathedrals in the sense of reverberant potential, as deep-time spaces with unique and varying resonant signatures. Just as the architecture of human-made spaces hold memory, and the acoustical resonance of these spaces echo the history of their fabrication and roles over the years, so too does the acoustical architecture of a sea cave hold memory. 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, played out in a cave that has been sculpted over millennia and continues to be sculpted by increasingly erratic climatic phenomena. We are hearing the physicality of the cave via resonance and echo; we are listening to cave memory.

Though the sea cave is made of stone, it is anything but static. It is as much in flux as the shrinking / expanding tideline, as the daily ebb and flow of water, though governed by much slower forces of change. The fragility of our coastline’s health and the fragility of this eroding cave are in daily conversation with tides bearing microplastic-suffused, acidified, and ever-warming waters. This is a composition of decomposition and re-composition. Listening to the cave enables us to experience tidal flows and movements across time and space. The project imagines a radical intimacy with the sea cave, the planet, and ourselves.

We humans are enfleshed, enmeshed, entangled; we are beings living among other beings, on a rapidly-changing planet. What do we have to learn by pausing to listen to—and learn from—our more-than-human neighbors? Throughout the album, migrating birds, sea stars, penguins, frogs and tidepool hydraulics enter into conversation with musical 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, multitudinous means of knowing and worlding, and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales.

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 multi-esophageal bodies that wheeze and hum, sigh and honk.

Rigby works with pipe organs to facilitate a diversity of sensory experiences and 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. We experienced vibrational communication, a realm where touch and sound are linked by the dour grumble of a pipe organ played at close range.

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.

The pipe organs featured on this album are incredibly old and complex instruments, featuring banks of pipes that tower like trees and breathe like gills. They hiss, cough, growl and scream. Each one is incredibly unique and sometimes it feels as though they have a mind of their own. You don’t play a pipe organ so much as collaborate with it.

Even if you’re sitting at the other end of the cathedral, your relationship with a pipe organ is tactile. With pipes as tall as pines and some just as thick, the instrument is large enough to carry a vibrational weight that we feel in our bones, much in the the same way as a sea cave turned walk-in-cello. Perceiving pipe organs in an embodied experience.

Throughout this album, pipe organ dirges and sea cave growls enter into an ever-evolving conversation. Sea caves and pipe organs transmogrify into megafaunal roarers. They carry memory—deep time and human time, respectively, and they embody entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound. Rigby collaborates with sea caves and pipe organs to explore climate anxiety and imagine futurities which complexify our relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, kinship and care, climate grief and climate futurities.

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 or soniferous body—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, with ourselves--by finding new ways to think about listening?

Sea Cave Breathing is both an opera and a visual album. Video footage throughout the album shows ashy tides interacting with the sea cave. Ever since the climate change-exacerbated Eaton and Palisades firestorms of January 2025, rains have been flushing toxic ash laced with asbestos and heavy metals into the ocean, where it washes ashore on Los Angeles beaches. Interwoven are images from underneath and within the sea cave and surrounding waters, as well as from further afield. By bringing imagery of sea caves local to Los Angeles into conversation with imagery of animals from other parts of the world, the opera aims to cultivate relational thinking about ecological systems and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales.

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. Biotremology refers to animal communication via vibration. It is a multidisciplinary field that hybridizes entomology and physics to understand vibrational communication among insects. Insects create communicative vibrations via stridulation (rubbing body parts together; cicadas rub their wings and vibrate their tymbals, or sound producing organs), tremulation and percussion. These signals are transmitted via substrate. Leaf hoppers, for instance, communicate via vibrations borne by plant tissues. How can thinking about—and listening to—biotremology expand our senses of sensory diversity? How can we extend this line of thinking to pipe organs? Pipe organs are large and loud enough to allow for a diversity of sensorial experience. We can listen to them through the bones of our bodies, not just our ears.

The human ear is only one means of perceiving sound. Can finding new means to listen—via bone conduction and vibrational communication for instance—and new means to think about listening catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human ways of sensing space, place and time? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world by finding new ways to experience listening, to pay attention? 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 political act?

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. Indeed, moments of riotous interspecies abundance—sawing cicadas, chirping crickets, braying penguins—are interspersed with sudden silence, echoing the precarity of endangered ecologies and endangered soundscapes.

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?

Album Link

Visual 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