I’ve been extremely nostalgic lately, iPod blasting out Wire, X, Pylon, Pointed Sticks, Young Canadians, the Germs, Gun Club, PiL, Patti Smith and Joy Division, sharing their tunes with friends, both old school punks and young champions of the genre. I revel in it as much as I ever did and dammit, it’s timeless.

Life, including recording and performing music, was so much simpler then, hence the nostalgia, even melancholy. Just do it was precisely how we did it. These days it seems there is so much more crap to surmount! Why does it have to be so bloody hard to get together to jam, write, rehearse, record, perform? I miss singing, though singing lyrics—singing the way I used to with my previous bands—is not quite what I do with Roderick Shoolbraid and our AURAL Heather duo. My throat slings (spoken) word along with, and in and out of, melody. I described AURAL Heather in our press release as a sublime fusion of music and poetry and dubbed our material spoken word song. Though our logistics are daunting and AURAL Heather is currently simmering on a back burner—as we work to complete our How To Remain video—our sound, once described as “Lynchian,” keeps right on cooking.

Recently, I found myself getting defensive when a friend complained that Roderick’s guitar drowns out my vocals. I sighed. It’s difficult to explain our aural challenges, that what we’re attempting to pull off is a delicate balancing act. Maybe I sighed so loudly because I’m on the verge of conceding that it may be impossible, feeling sensitive out of sheer frustration. There really is never any excuse but there is an explanation.

Onstage Roderick orchestrates while performing and playing guitar, manipulating his laptop as well as numerous pre-recorded tracks of music and sound effects. There are other variables to mediate as well including the venue’s stage, sound system, acoustics, or lack thereof and the backing vocals which I cue off of. Neither of us is trying to dominate, we’re actually striving to integrate our parts. Of course it’s vital that the words be discernable! Roderick is well aware of that and we work hard to that end. For our debut for example, we went to the Media Club early, worked with the soundman for over an hour and it still came out like crap, according to some people. Other audience members claimed it sounded great. Arrgghh! In any case, I can do nothing from the stage, am in no position to monitor our sound during the performance.

The whole endeavor is hairy indeed but I can’t afford to hire a sound crew or more musicians so this is our compromise, our solution. Equally frustrating is knowing that Roderick and I have pulled off our show beautifully more often than not (see Sound Bytes review below) and despite harsh circumstances.

I get defensive too because Roderick is a good friend, we enjoy a strong rapport. I trust him and feel fortunate to have such a talented producer to partner with in my creative endeavours. He isn’t malicious or trying to drown me out. I love electric guitar and encouraged him while we were working on Princess Nut to do just that. “I want it to rock!” and he delivered the goods. I was thrilled with the music and arrangements he came up with but yes, playing live is so difficult that I’ve vowed not to attempt it again unless we can hire a sound man/technician and have control over the venue, over the variables in other words. We’re planning to perform at my upcoming Three Blocks West of Wonderland book launch party, brave the aural madness, have fun. Celebrate! Keep rockin’ in the free world.

“I recently had the pleasure of seeing Heather Haley and Roderick Shoolbraid, who together comprise Aural Heather, perform live in a small room. Aural Heather’s words and music are well suited to such an intimate “chamber music” setting, reaching out and touching each listener at a personal level. The intricate interplay of of Haley’s words and Shoolbraid’s music works well in a studio recording and it was a pleasant surprise to see this duo carry it off so well in a live setting. These works are complex enough to have foiled a less talented duo.

To many listeners, these performances may be quite a new experience. In fact, while there is a certain freshness to Aural Heather’s presentation, performances and recordings in this genre have been available for at least five decades. If they are little known to the general public, it’s perhaps because artists in this genre have tended to be somewhat underground, playing to artists, intellectuals, and the coffee house crowd. Only occasionally has a recording of spoken word and music that edges toward experimental slipped over onto mainstream radio. One or two of the songs on this release may be able to make that crossover, or at least get played on college radio stations.

I’ve long found it interesting that styles in the arts often divide not north-south between Canada and the United States but east-west with the distinction appearing to be between artists working west of the Rockies and artists working in central Canada and the American states southward from there. In performance of spoken word with music, the west-coast style is quite distinctive. The performance of Canada’s Aural Heather falls quite firmly into that west-coast spectrum.

At root, these performances might be described as poetry read over somewhat experimental music. Of course, such a description is quite inadequate. It’s true that Heather Haley writes some quite powerful poetry and she reads and sometimes sings it over music created and performed by Roderick Shoolbraid. However, this is no poetry reading, no academic professor reading to a gathering of bored students, no jaded beatnick addressing equally jaded coffee house denizens. The poetry and music here is vital and alive. The performance has its own energy that goes beyond just the two performers and draws in the audience. There is a merging of the words and music that takes on a life of its own.

Neither is the content fey or artsy. In her poems and lyrics, Haley takes on real life issues and is clearly not one to hold her tongue. Among her topics are the murders of women in Vancouver that went ignored and uninvestigated for decades, drug culture in British Columbia, anorexia and bulimia, Wonderland (the movie about porn-star John Holmes’ drug involvement), and more. Shoolbraid’s music avoids the stereotypes of sweet electronic music or the schlock of Walter Murphy’s pop hits. Shoolbraid’s music abounds with rocking beats, solid blues riffs, surfing fills that would do Tangerine Dream proud. Put these words and music together, and the whole truly is greater than the parts.”-Bob McKenzie, Sound Bytes