Sea Cave Breathing II
Album release date: July 4, 2025
Details
Pipe organ, viola, prepared piano, geophone, transducers, contact mics, brass sound sculpture (consisting of found objects and instruments welded together then percussed, trumpeted and activated with transducers and contact mics), field recordings featuring: sea caves (temporarily transmogrified into walk-in cellos via wire and bow), animals that build their lives around sea caves in intertidal zones (sea stars, urchins and octopi), and animals from further afield (hagfish, beetles, fur seal pups and Oaxacan cicadas).
The album crawls into the sensory worlds of cicadas and sea stars, hagfish and herons, silk moths and bats. Pulling questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another, the project asks: how can learning the stories of our more-than-human neighbors help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our planet?
Can exploring different means of listening, sensing and sounding support radical re-imaginings of potential ecological futurities?
When does the art of careful listening, of paying attention, start to expand our perceptions of the world?
What does it mean to listen deeply in times of climate crisis?
Sounds of living fossils like hagfish—benthic scavengers who clean whale falls and other carcasses—to bring us into relation with the soundscapes of past eras. When we hear the rasping sounds of hagfish feeding, we are hearing them scraping rows of keratinous teeth on decaying 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 300 million years ago, a time before dinosaurs. When we listen to a living fossil, we are brought into relation with deep time.
Recordings of stridulating crabs speak to a time before Pangea’s fracturing, when crabs started evolving the ridges that made possible their soniferous capabilities.
Sea stars walk on tube feet. But those same feet also act as sensory organs, complete with chemical receptors that can sense food as well as predator secretions. 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.
Sawing cicadas—echoes of the Jurassic period--reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.
To listen to cicadas is to listen in on a world where time works differently.
For dormant subterranean nymphs, an internal molecular clock helps keep stock of the passing years. For aloft adults, two compound eyes are quick to capture fast movement—much quicker than our own human eyes. A single second of human time contains much more visual information for an insect than it does for a human. A cicada’s high visual input rate means that she processes visual information faster that us. Compared to us, she’s experiencing the world in slow motion. Hers is a world where time moves more slowly.
Cicadas are percussionists. They make their sounds by flexing their muscles which causes their two tymbals (membranes connected to those muscles) to buckle inward rapidly. Each tymbal has a series of ridges which click one by one, like a bendy straw. When a cicada vibrates those tymbals in and out, all those clicks blur to become one sustained buzzing sound.
Cicadas also communicate via substrate-born vibrations, sending signals through tree branches and plant tissues. They listen with their legs.
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), tremulation and percussion. These signals are transmitted via substrates like twigs or leaves. Leaf hoppers, for instance, communicate via vibrations borne by plant tissues.
The rookery track celebrates cormorants, tactile foragers who probe in dim, murky areas. Their bills have touch receptors—like the Pacinian corpuscles in elephant feet--that are sensitive to vibration and pressure changes.
Track 2 features field recordings from a meeting with an octopus. When I dropped a hydrophone in the tank of an octopus at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, the octopus immediately oozed over and began tasting. Her skin bloomed from bone-white (the color an octopus wears while relaxed and resting) to mottled brown.
We can hear the sounds of her squeezing, tasting, and passing the hydrophone from suction cup to suction cup, and perhaps even scraping it with her radula. (An octopus’s radula is like a chainsaw tongue that sits within her parrot-like beak. It’s a chitinous, tooth-studded ribbon that scrapes and rasps, like a woodworker’s flat file).
The sensory world of an octopus is one in which touch and taste operate hand in hand. Imagine if you could taste an orange in your hand just by holding it. An octopus’s suction cups house sensors called chemotactile receptors that help her understand what exactly she is touching.
The chromatophores in an octopus’s skin hold sacks of pigment that expand when her muscles contract, stretching and making visible the pigment within.
An octopus cannot hide her emotions. When she’s excited, she wears it on her sleeve (or skin, in this case).
The opera features a variety of field recordings gathered from sea caves.
South of Los Angeles, California breathe sea caves carved from ancient rock.
The caves are windows into our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. They’ve borne witness to our collective past, to the processes that shaped our planet and who we are.
Pipe organs too are relics of ancient worlds. Like sea caves, their breathing is a matter of apertures opening and closing.
Sea caves and pipe organs have the power to expand and entangle our thinking about ritual and breathing, listening and resonance, place and time.
The story of southern California’s sea caves 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 formations during the Miocene epoch.
My part in the story began about five years ago, when I started collaborating with a complex of sea caves near Los Angeles. I stretched and bowed wire, and the caves began to hum, whisper and growl. Lithic lutherie transformed the caves into walk-in cellos.
I listened to the caves being bowed, and I also listened to the caves through the lens of a geophone.
Stone is anything but silent. Low-frequency sounds are constantly coursing through it, murmurations of lithic vibrations that geophones enable us to hear.
Stones possess resonance. Geophones enable us to hear this secret resonance.
Elephants listen to communications emitted by distant family members by pressing their highly-sensitive feet into the soil and physically feeling infrasonic sound waves. A geophones also works with ground movements, but it converts those low-frequency sounds into electrical signals, into sounds that we can hear.
I think of it as a means of putting a finger on the hidden pulse of a site. A geophone enables us to listen to stone and to listen through stone, to hear the sounds of today’s world through an ancient lens. What does geological listening sound like?
When we listen to a sea cave by means of a geophone, we are listening to the cave in the present moment, as well as the echoes of that cave’s history. We are listening to the rocks, and we are listening to sounds coming at us through the rocks. We are listening to the ocean through a filter of rock. We are listening to the ocean through the remnants of past planets.
When we listen to the cave bowed, we are listening to the vibrational architecture of the sea cave, and to the echoes of deep time. We are listening to the ways that deep time has shaped to its unique low-frequency acoustical signature.
During my visits to the caves, the geophone picked up on vibrations happening within the cave walls. It also picked up on the drumming of ambulating crabs, the splash of cave droplets, and the low hum of a roaring surf. When placed in the sand, it became a window into the soundscapes of interstitial spaces, the vibrations among sand grains and the gaps between. It sounded as though the geophone had rendered the entire floor of the sea cave the batter head of a kick drum. The tiniest bead of water sliding from a ceiling slicked from yesterday’s tide fell with a boom.
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 sonic landscapes of sea caves, and invite us to hear rock in completely new ways.
Questions about coastal geological and natural histories, hidden resonances, and climatic pasts and futurities come to mind.
What is it like listen to the world through a Miocene-old filter of rock?
To listen to the secret rivers of sound streaming through stone?
What happens when we start to open our ears and minds to cave voice, cave memory, cave time?
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 imaginings of possible futures?
Can listening to sea caves cultivate a sense of lithic empathy?
What does a sea cave’s memory 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
Credits and Gratitude
Bats recorded by Ben Kinsley at Campbient Residency, Manchester State Park, WA 2025.
Audio mastered by Michael Southard (RumourTone Music LLC).
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.
The outdoor sound sculpture installations were temporary and left no trace on the environment.
Pipe organ parts recorded at Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.
Brass sound sculpture welded at the Okada Sculpture and Ceramics Facility, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
