Julia Edith Rigby and Rita McKeough performed this original piece for a live audience for SAPPYFEST, a music festival in Sackville New Brunswick (August 2024). Rigby performed on the pipe organ and viola. McKeough performed on synthesizers. Rigby and McKeough performed this piece in the Mount Allison University Chapel, home to a pipe organ with 1,563 pipes. 

The piece explores entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound. Rigby and McKeough sourced many of their field recordings for this project from the local waterfowl park, where they recorded wild ducks, geese and grebes. 

In the piece, Rigby works with the pipe organ to explore sustained sound, resonance and new means of listening, for instance listening though bone conduction. She works with the viola to explore string harmonics and dissonance.

The performance explores collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals and environments, imagining futurities which complexify our relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities.

Leah Crosby contributed pre-recorded vocals; Ursula Sokol and Alec Brilling contributed pre-recorded audio.

Felt Noise

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream premiered on the roof of the historic Bendix Building in Los Angeles at sunset on November 16, 2024. Julia Edith Rigby’s experimental and interactive opera brought twenty-two musicians into conversation with the acoustical architecture of the Bendix Building. 

The project experimented with geophone technology to temporarily transform the roof of the Bendix Building into a community-activated instrument, an acoustical commonage. A geophone is a piece of seismological equipment used to pick up sounds normally outside of the human range of hearing, such as the low-frequency rumbles of a building experiencing phenomena like wind or human activity. 

The geophone enabled performers to improvise with their environment, bringing live spatial soundings (from the building and the street) into conversation with live soundings (from the opera performers as well as the audience) to create ephemeral, site-specific feedback loops. Audience members become listeners and sounders, active agents in the creation of the performance via their movements and soundings.

The musicians were moving all around the roof while playing, and the audience was invited to move with them, to listen via movement and the physically feel the instrumentation and various degrees of resonance in their bodies. The project experimented with more-than-human means of listening, with moving beyond the realm of cochlear vibration into the realm of bone conduction. The audience was invited to engage with the instruments and with the geophone, to contribute to the soundscape via their movements and interactions, to contemplate sound as spatial force and sensory sensitivity in relation to movement. The project was a means of tuning into our surroundings as well as to one another. 

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream catalyzed transformations by which the viewers / listeners became the performers, creating a space for collective listening and collective improvisation, radical noticing and regenerative world-making. Rigby’s field recordings of silk moths, frogs, golden-headed lion tamarins and desert ants, bristlecone pine trees and sea caves entered into a conversation with live instrumentation. 

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, animals and climatic phenomena, the opera expanded our human-centered understanding of perception / world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. 

Field recordings of animal vocalizations were arranged with recordings of local sea caves. Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site or object’s resonance catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human timescales? 

Rigby performed live on viola as well as a sound sculpture that she welded from sousaphones, French horns and found brass objects salvaged from waste streams. She scored the composition for the following instruments as well: cello, viola, violin, sousaphone, French horn, tuba, piano, and voice. Rigby was joined by Liminal Voices and Orchestra, a choral-orchestral ensemble for experienced musicians that identify within the LGBTQ+/Gender Expansive/BBIA (Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian) communities as well as Eight Tapes Choir, a vocal collective of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive musicians working at the intersection of professional, identity-driven, and community-building choral ensembles.

The ensemble featured Nicki Chen, Rogelio Resendiz, Ben Kinsley, Leora Malka, Andrew Fong, Chris McKelway, Grace Dashnaw, Mason Moy, Simone Maura, Spencer Bowie, Grant Laren, Adrian Narro, Andrew Dalziell, Dr. Fabián Rodríguez Castro, Dylan Leisure, Jessica Joyce, Charis Tshihamba, Tanner Pfeiffer, Socks Whitmore, Perigee Vitz-Wong  and Anastasia Gastelum. The opera was hosted by Heidi Duckler Dance, Los Angeles’ leading site-specific dance company.

Life Cycle of a Fever Dream

Live Performance

Bristlecone pine tree, sound sculpture (welded brass instruments and objects), cello bow

Site-responsive sound performance in southern California which experiments with listening to a many-thousand year old tree—as well as its interactions with the sound sculpture and with its surrounding environment—on a more-than-human timescale.

The performance was temporary and did not involved touching the tree in any way. The performance left no trace on the tree or the environment.

2024

Soniferous Elderflorae

Ephemeral sound installation in which a sea cave in California transmogrifies into a cello-like sound sculpture via wire and bow. 

Sea cave, wire, cello bow.

Experimental audio compositions are composed from audio recorded on site of the ephemeral sound installation interacting with the bow as well as its environment during low and high tide. Rigby built a sound sculpture to tension wire throughout the length of a sea cave, and bowed the wire in a series of durational performances with her cello bow. The sea cave itself became the cello body, with an immense resonant capacity. 

The sound sculpture, installation and performance left no trace on the sea cave or the surrounding environment. 

2024

Sea Cave Transmogrified

I am an experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound. My projects explore collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals and environments, imagining futurities which complexify our relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities.

Julia Edith Rigby

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