Praise for AURAL Heather
"Your performances remind me of Daniel Lanois. Well produced, storytelling, poetics. Evocative and worthy of repeated listening. Congratulations!"
- Julie Wilson, Seen Reading.com
"An interesting twist on poetry, AURAL Heather has taken the art form to higher levels of cool. Pulling no punches, AURAL Heather drops the truth on a diverse array of controversial topics relevant to society. Doing it with an undeniable allure, lead poet Haley's voice is both sensual and intriguing, delivering the real to you without apology.” - Catask.com
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“Whether you’re a long term fan of this artistic genre or it’s something you’ve not yet discovered, I highly recommend giving a listen to Aural Heather’s Princess Nut, subtitled Spoken Word Songs. You’ll find it’s quite an experience.” - Bob MacKenzie’s CD Reviews Read the full review >
"...a whole the Lynchian landscape Heather Haley and Roderick Shoolbraid conjure of railroads, murders, cement factories and distant twangy guitar"
– Soundproof Magazine
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"Your new work is superb. I love it, real gutsy and political yet ripe with emotion."
- Kedrick James
"Poetess and ramrod Heather Haley proves there's rock and roll beyond art."
- LA Weekly
"Powerful words driven by great beats and sounds."
– Brian Routh, Kipper Kids
"Brilliant. You rock! And you're going to make your audiences rock." - author Biff Mitchell, Black Top Motorcycle Club
Praise for their first cd, Surfing Season:
"Beautiful. A credit to the genre."
- Ian Ferrier, Wired on Words
"Great job! An auspicious disc. One of the best albums of its kind."
- Kurt Heintz, e-poets
"Important work."-Poseybeat
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THE LATEST :
New Projects in 2011
AURAL Heather is entering an exciting new phase in 2011! Heather Haley will be recording a new CD and performing solo, spoken word songs from Princess Nut along with new works. She will be touring Alberta in April.
A Busy 2010
AURAL Heather, aka Heather Haley and Roderick Shoolbraid, are focused on and have nearly completed the videopoem or music video for "How To Remain," and plan to market, promote it both ways whenever necessary. It was shot in September with Bowen TV's George Zawadzki and Roderick is currently in editing mode. We need to achieve several special effects in post production and our friend George Faulkner is helping out.
I performed solo at the Summer Dreams Festival in Vancouver and at the Saturday Afternoon Poetry at the Pasadena Public Library in September. AURAL Heather was honoured to be invited to present at the &Now Conference of Innovative Literature at SUNY-Buffalo, New York in October but alas we couldn't raise the travel funds. In November I performed solo again at a reading for Peter Trower in Gibsons, BC. There are a couple of live AURAL Heather shows in the works, which we will announce soon, one will be the launch party for Heather Haley's new book, "Three Blocks West of Wonderland."
AURAL Heather is the new weather, a unique, sublime fusion of song and spoken word by iconoclast, poet-vocalist Heather Haley and dazzling guitarist-producer, Roderick Shoolbraid.
“The intricate interplay of Haley’s words and Shoolbraid’s music works well in a studio recording and it was a pleasant surprise to see them carry it off so well in a live setting. These works are complex enough to have foiled a less talented duo. The poetry and music here is vital and alive. The performance has its own energy that draws in the audience. Put these words and music together and the whole truly is greater than the parts.” -Sound Bytes
These charming redheads, working in a myriad of media and from disparate backgrounds, have joined forces in bold experimentalism to produce a much-lauded video, Purple Lipstick, and their inaugural CD, Surfing Season. Roderick Shoolbraid has always been open to re-working the paradigms at hand, though classical music and jazz are the pillars of his career. Heather Haley is an artist intimate with the music of language. Raised on folk and country music, she discovered rock and was composing songs and poems from the age of six. Often found pushing boundaries and always on the vanguard, she is "a Canadian national treasure.” Her band HHZ/Heather Haley & the Zellots-was praised by LA Weekly music critic Craig Lee as one of the city’s “Ten Great Bands.”
AURAL Heather’s brawny, uncompromising and emotionally charged spoken word songs rouse audiences with a high-impact live show that places them in a genre-crossing, category-defying position, truly and only unto themselves.
AURAL Heather has recently been featured on CBC Radio, Liquid Lunch and Howl with Nik Beat-CIUT Radio 89.5 FM-Toronto, CKUT-FM-Montreal, Wax Poetic-CFRO/Vancouver, CKXU-Lethrbridge, Word Slingers-WLUW FM/Chicago, Outsight Radio Hours-Detroit, Nette Radio and Blog Talk Radio/Los Angeles and covered by the Village Voice, Tom Harrison-Vancouver Province, Vincent Tingueley-Montreal Mirror. They took their "groundbreaking" spoken word songs on the road last summer, the first leg of their international tour with dates in Ottawa, Kingston, Chicago, New York, Montreal and Toronto. AURAL Heather will continue to make BC appearances as they prepare to tour eastern Canada/U.S in the summer and Europe in the fall.
“Princess Nut” available for purchase at: