LEAF 2024 – Julia Edith Rigby w/Amy Biondo
Friday, April 19, 7pm – FREE
Center for Musical Arts (CMA), 200 E Baseline Rd, Lafayette, CO 80026
Swell Organ (variations)
Swell Organ (variations) comprises earlier renditions of the work that utilize field recordings of sculptural elements, natural locations and living creatures, and video footage captured by the artist of those same elements from specific geographic locales. For LEAF 2024, Julia will perform a newly composed version of the work with live processed viola, and Amy Biondo on voice.
Many of the sounds in this piece were created via the sound sculpture “Brass Tide,” (https://juliaedithrigby.com/brass-tide) welded from traumatized instruments salvaged from waste streams and flea markets. Additional audio was created by Kafele Williams—trumpet @kafelewilliams and The Wrinkles in Time—brass band @thewrinklesintime_band
Sea cave sounds sourced from Sea Cave Complex project (https://vimeo.com/802503338?share=copy).
Field recordings include wild bats and scarab beetles, Galapagos sea lion pups and tortoises, tree frogs and crickets, cicadas and sea storms, soniferous fish and marine isopods.
Starfish tube feet audio recorded at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California.
Video footage and sounds salvaged from Los Angeles, Omaha, Berlin, Costa Rica and the Galapagos.
Video footage includes documentation of the performance “Gill Valves” at Re-formed Love Performing Arts Space in Omaha, Nebraska (https://juliaedithrigby.com/gillvalves).
About Julia Edith Rigby
Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among people, landscapes, more-than-human actors and natural processes. She works with found materials and found sites to explore phenomena, perception and sense of place. She is curious about acoustical, climatic and environmental phenomena in relation to polyphony (specifically bioacoustical melodies) and phenology (the study of seasonal natural phenomena), and the ways that we perceive these relationships somatically. Rigby’s work explores cohabitating and collaborating with more-than-human actors. She creates interactive, site-responsive sound sculptures that explore a site’s sonic signature, rendering audible the inaudible. Her multisensorial installations and performances hybridize live instrumentation, field recordings, and projection mapping to open our minds to different timescales, introduce new ways of thinking about environmental relationships and new ways of listening, and queer socioecological histories and futurities. She is particularly interested in relationships among ecological and sonic decay, degeneration and regeneration. Her work asks questions about radical noticing and regenerative worldmaking, multispecies relationships, acoustical architecture, ambisonic sound, and community-activated performance.
Rigby is based in Los Angeles and Berlin. She is a recipient of a Quick Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation and a OneBeat Fellowship from OneBeat and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. This spring she will be an artist resident at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. She has been an artist in residence at GlougauAIR Artist Residency in Berlin, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Kala Art Institute, and others. Rigby has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020), where she was a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the Fay Nelson Award.
About Amy Biondo
A versatile performer with a 4-octave range, Amy is equally comfortable climbing inside the rich rhythmic and harmonic structure of a modern jazz composition; mining deep into the emotional story of an old chestnut and communicating the timeless beauty that is still relevant today; resonating with the nuanced heartbeat of a traditional folk song in Spanish, Portuguese, or French; or belting out a rock tune to a room full of people who can’t help but dance.
Amy has performed genres ranging from jazz to Latin to gypsy jazz to free improvisation to Kirtan to pop/rock and beyond. These diverse musical influences, combined with Amy’s background in theater and modern dance, create a charismatic stage presence and a deeply embodied and refreshingly unique vocal style and delivery.
Amy works regularly with Art Lande (ECM), Venezuelan virtuoso Gonzalo Teppa, Bill Kopper (Octave Recording), Carmen Sandim (Rope-a-Dope), and the late Ron Miles (Blue Note), among others. Passionate about world music, she has extensively studied the music of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and France. Amy has performed and toured across the United States and abroad, including the San Diego Opera House, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, venues in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Britain, and Ireland, and venues in Colorado. She has appeared at City Park Jazz, Donkey Creek, Five Points Jazz, and on radio stations KUVO and KGNU.
A prolific studio musician, Amy is featured as a lead vocalist on the self-titled albums Sundays at Vic’s (2007) and Los Bohemios (2013), as well as countless other studio recordings as a background vocalist. Amy also writes and records custom love songs for special events such as weddings, birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, memorial services, and more!
Amy’s band, the Amy Biondo Ensemble, features her original compositions which are rhythmically complex with evocative lyrics and innovative arrangements, jazz at the heart but heavily peppered with pop, R&B, and Latin American influences. She also performs with Los Bohemios (Afro-Cuban/Mexican), Milestone (variety), and a duo with Colorado jazz guitarist Bill Kopper (jazz/world/pop).
