Sea Cave Breathing II

Release Date: July 24, 2025.

Pipe organ, viola, piano (plucked, bowed, prepared with welded brass key weights and electronics), brass sound sculpture (consisting of found objects and instruments welded together then percussed, trumpeted and activated with transducers and contact mics), projection mapped moving imagery, field recordings gathered from sea caves (temporarily transformed into walk-in cellos via wire and bow), ambulating sea stars, feeding hagfish, stridulating beetles, chorusing frogs and toads, bleating fur seal pups, respiring tortoises, and Oaxacan cicadas.

Pipe organ recorded at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. Moving imagery featuring hagfish and moray eels was projection-mapped onto the interior walls of the church, as well as onto the carved wooden organ case.

Brass sound sculpture welded at the Okada Sculpture and Ceramics Facility, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.

Visual album features performances on pipe organ, piano, viola, and sound sculptures at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California, Mount Allison University Chapel in New Brunswick, Canada, and sea caves along the coast of southern California.

Details

Sea Cave Breathing II celebrates our resonating world. The album features pipe organ, piano (plucked, bowed and prepared), viola, brass instrumentation, field recordings and noise elements.  

The album explores relationships among sea caves and pipe organs, and the ways that they can entangle and expand our thinking about breathing, listening and resonance.

The project tells stories of sea caves. Rigby spent the past five years collaborating with a complex of sea caves south of Los Angeles, where she bowed ephemeral sound sculptures to transmogrify the sea caves into roaring instruments.

The sound sculptures consist of welded brass objects and piano wire, which when bowed transformed the sea caves into walk-in cellos.

A sea cave is a site 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.

What can sea caves tell us about growth and decay, transience and memory, listening and care?

If the ocean is our planet’s 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 a 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 a 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 a place. 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.

Sea caves—like cellos or cathedrals—have their own unique reverberant potential, and varying resonance signatures. Just as the architectures of human-made spaces hold memory, so too do sea caves. The sea cave tunnels deep into a decaying cliff, its dark channels winding far beyond the eyes’ reach.

Sounding a sea cave helps us understand its spatiality, albeit 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. These particular sea caves are many millions of years old. Thinking about sea caves brings us into relation with deep time, with a planetary pace.

Though made of stone, a sea cave 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 sea cave sits at an ecotone, an edge. This intertidal zone is a meeting place of land and sea. Here the elements—water, wind and earth—meet to create a fertile, vibrant, and abundant intertidal zone populated by sea stars, hermit crabs, sea slugs, urchins, brittle stars and octopi.

The sea is a sculptor. Ebb tides recede, flood tides surge in endless cycles that are forever shaping the face of this rocky sea cliff pocked with caves. The changes are too slow for human perception, except when climate-exacerbated atmospheric rivers pound the coastline, or asbestos-infused ash from nearby wildfires blacken the waves.

The fragility of these coastal ecologies and the fragility of this eroding cave are in daily conversation with tides bearing microplastic-suffused, acidified, and ever-warming waters. This project is a composition of degeneration and regeneration, decomposition and recomposition.

Listening to coastal ecologies and to sea caves is an exercise in cultivating a deeper understanding of larger ecological crises and collapse. The project imagines a radical intimacy with the sea cave, the planet, and with ourselves.

Sea Cave Breathing II experiments with resonant space, vibrational architecture, string harmonics, soniferous bodies, dissonance, pipe organ polyphonies and interspecies collaborations. 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, cicadas, 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 project 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 anxiety 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.

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. Every pipe organ is uniquely constructed and richly storied, and the process of playing one feels more like a collaboration.

Even if the listener is sitting at the other end of the cathedral, their 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 like a sea cave turned walk-in-cello. Pipe organs present an embodied experience.

Pipe organs were built for sacred spaces, and those sacred spaces were built to carry sound. Rigby’s collaboration with pipe organs is also a collaboration with the spaces in which those pipe organs are housed.

Rigby brings the resonance of sea caves into dialogue with the resonance of cathedrals. Acoustically speaking, both places are similar in the ways they carry sound.

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 resting with their backs against 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 low frequency ground vibrations communicated by distant family members 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, who must patiently wait for returning echoes and may even possess a different sense of time compared to humans who rely on tactile and visual feedback—the performance aimed to cultivate new ways of listening via flesh contact with the organ body.

The community-activated performance reconfigured the listeners as performers, creating an ephemeral acoustical commonage, an ecological system of improvisational give and take.

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. These collaborations ask 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?

The album pulls questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of kinship, care and worlding, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? What does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? What are different ways of learning from the intelligences of other living beings? What do we stand to gain from cultivating an upwelling of earthly wonder and expanded empathy?

Throughout the album, interspecies sonics feature animals often-overlooked and under-heard. By rendering audible the inaudible, the project also seeks to bring us into relation with sounds that usually exist outside of our ranges of perception.

Sounds of cicadas accompany the pipe organ. Cicadas communicate by rubbing their wings and vibrating their tymbals, or sound producing organs. They also communicate via substrate-born vibrations, sending signals through tree branches and plant tissues.

How can thinking about—and listening to—cicadas 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?

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, intertidal zones, animals and climatic phenomena, the album aims to expand our human-centered understandings of perception and world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. How do other animals make sound? How do they listen?

Wild bats and beetles, sea lions and tortoises, coyotes and hagfish, cicadas and cormorants, marine isopods and herons are among the many animals voicing the field recordings.

The album interweaves sounds of living fossils like hagfish—benthic scavengers who clean whale falls and other carcasses.

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 survivor of multiple mass extinctions, a living fossil. Listening to hagfish brings us into relation with deep time, and with the soundscapes of our ancient deep seas.

Galapagos tortoises also sound the score. The sighs of respiring Galapagos tortoises speak not only to a life lived on a more-than-human timescale, but to engaging with time itself in entirely different ways. These methusalean giants will go on wading in pond muck and feasting on wild guavas for two hundred years. They live slowly, breathe slowly and die slowly. At rest, their hearts beat 6 times per minute. They bring us into relation with long time.

At the Bodega Marine Laboratory, Rigby recorded the sounds of sea stars and sea urchins walking on glass. She recorded the sounds of hagfish tunneling into decomposing squids at Chapman University in Orange, California. She recorded audio of an octopus scraping the hydrophone with her radula at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Long Beach, California.

The album asks questions about multispecies relationships and interdependence--about more-than-human intelligence and multitudinous means of knowing and existing—while imagining futurities that complexify our understandings of sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and possibility. What does it mean to find new ways to listen—for example via vibration, tactility, and bone conduction—and to pay attention in these uncertain times?

How can finding different ways to listen help us reimagine new ecologies and interspecies futures? Can exploring different means of sensing support radical re-imaginings of potential ecological futurities? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of political act?

While playing the pipe organ at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, Rigby projection-mapped images of respiring sharks on the walls. The images depict sharks’ gills and lateral lines. Lateral lines are structures linking touch and sound, tools for vibrational communication that translate particle motion phenomena (sound) into sensory information. They enable a shark to sense shifts in water pressure and movement—the directionality of a passing fish, for instance. They are another means of listening.

Shark snouts are pitted with electromagnetic-sensing Ampullae of Lorenzini, which help them detect weak electrical fields cast by living prey—a fish contracting its muscle, for instance—as well as the earth’s electrical fields. These electroreceptors may even help sharks navigate by the earth’s magnetic field during migrations.

What can we learn from taking a moment to consider the sensory worlds of sharks? To consider the specialized sensitivities that guide their lives, from the electrical currents swirling around a carcass feed that dictate dominance and who may eat next, to the swelling pull of instinct and sensation that catalyzes waves of collective, coordinated mass migration? What can we learn from considering the multiplicities of more-than-human intelligence exhibited by the diversity of beings with whom we share this planet? When we consider the intricacies of shark sensation and migration, what can we learn about own means of operating as animal bodies in the context of our own sensory worlds?

Sea Cave Breathing is about listening to sea caves, and to the animals that build their lives around them. Octopi, crabs, sea stars and urchins sound the score. The project is also about listening to animals from further afield. A migrating Swainson’s thrush may not directly interact with sea caves, but what happens to the sea and to sea caves plays into her life.

Bats, penguins, Golden-headed lion tamarins and cicadas are all connected as well, on a larger planetary scale. The project brings field recordings from these caves into conversation with audio featuring animals from other parts of the world. Field recordings of hissing beetles, ambulating sea urchins and echolocating bats are interwoven throughout. The work aims to cultivate relational thinking about ecological systems and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales. Throughout the visual album, imagery pulled from local sea caves and local train routes—for instance the route that leaves Union Station and follows the course of the Los Angeles River southwards—is layered with imagery from further afield, from Baja California’s waters to Washington rocky coastlines.

Silk moths, frogs, tortoises, toads and sea caves enter into conversation with live instrumentation. By bringing the sounds of sea caves local to Los Angeles into conversation with interspecies collaborations and sounds from farther afield, the opera aims to cultivate relational thinking about geological time, ecological systems and socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales. How can we practice listening locally and globally at the same time?

Sea Cave Breathing 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, chorusing toads, croaking cormorants, bleating fur seal pups and braying penguins—are interspersed with sudden silence, echoing the precarity of endangered ecologies and endangered soundscapes.

The album features the song of a Swainson’s thrush at dawn, as a reflection on the deep intelligence that powers these birds’ annual migration from their North American breeding grounds to their Central and South American wintering grounds. The birds migrate mostly at night via celestial navigation and internal compasses. Relying on dark skies in an ever-brightening night, they vocalize with one another in the darkness via distinct “peeps” so as to stay connected and navigate dangers en route, like colliding with structures in brightly-lit areas. What can be learned from these birds’ mastery of coordinated, collective movement? From the sensory worlds that guide them over such massive distances?

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?

Track List

1. Sea Cave Breathing II 30:10

2. An Octopus Explores the Hydrophone 00:08

3. Sea Urchin Tube Feet 00:05

4. Hagfish Stygian II 00:24

5. Golden-Headed Lion Tamarin 00:07

6. Fur Seal Pups 00:01

7. Silk Moth Wings 00:16

8. Sea Star Ambulations 00:25

9. Rookery at Bolinas Lagoon 01:17

10. Oaxacan Cicadas 01:41

11. Bats are Listening, 8000 Hz 02:36

12. Bats are Listening, 22050 Hz 00:47

Album Link

Credits

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 and the Mount Allison University Chapel in New Brunswick.

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.

Every outdoor sound sculpture installation was temporary and left no trace on the environment.

2025.