Lithic Breathing with Julia Edith Rigby

Resonance Collective presents Lithic Breathing - A concert work for pipe organ, viola, voice, field recordings, and live electronics, exploring the unexpected connections between sea caves and pipe organs—and how both can expand and entangle our thinking about ritual and breath, listening and resonance, deep time and sense of place.

Julia Edith Rigby performs on The Great Organs at First Congregational Church, creating immersive soundscapes inspired by ancient landscapes and opening our ears to subsonic listening, planetary histories, and infrasonic worlds.

Artist Bio

Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental composer and sound artist who thinks about our wild and resonating worlds—the world we inhabit now, and worlds that have come and gone. She is curious about lithic listening and lithic histories, the stories of rocks that have witnessed our collective past and the forces that shaped our planet. She researches ecological entanglements and sense of place, more-than-human architectures and timescales, climate memory and geological listening, planetary histories and resonance, sensory worlds and sense of time. Rigby improvises with pipe organ, prepared piano, viola, stones, infrasound, scientific instrumentation, field recordings, live electronics and moving imagery to take us on a deep dive into deep time and explore questions like: what stories can we learn from the rocks that exist—as they have for millennia--beneath the places we gather? How can listening to rocks help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our planet?

What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world—and our relationships with other living things, and with ourselves--by finding new ways to think about listening?

And how can listening help us imagine new futures in times of uncertainty?