Sea Cave Breathing I

Album release date: 02/28/25

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The opera crawls into the sensory worlds of cicadas and sea stars, hagfish and herons, beetles 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.

The opera features the song of a Swainson’s thrush at dawn, a meditation 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” 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, and from the sensory worlds that guide them over such massive distances?

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

Credits and Gratitude

Audio mastered by Michael Southard (RumourTone Music LLC).

Vocals performed by Mary Edwards, Leah Crosby, and Jacob Frost. Trumpet performed by Kafele Williams at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska.

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 at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, CA. 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.

Pipe organ, electric organ, viola, vocals, prepared piano, 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), ambulating sea stars, feeding hagfish, stridulating beetles, chorusing frogs and toads, braying penguins, respiring tortoises, echolocating bats and chorusing cicadas.

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