AROARA

BOUND BY SONG

Though Andrew Whiteman may be the brooding badass shredding those searing riffs in Broken Social Scene, he’s anything but reckless and irresponsible.

“Andrew’s driving right now, so you’ll have to talk to me,” says Ariel Engel, Whiteman’s wife and partner in crime in their new bucolic folk project, AroarA.

The duo have just released their debut LP. Dubbed In The Pines, the album – following an identically titled EP earlier this year – is a collection of songs based on verses from American poet Alice Notley’s work that were deconstructed, cannibalised and then re-constructed in a stark and beautifully Frankensteinian folk record.

The Notley book of the same name incorporates the use of powerful folk and blues imagery of the Depression period and the idea of re-purposing the words for use as songs is something that just kind of fell into Whiteman’s lap.

“When we first started making music, we played a few shows informally, doing weird Middle-Eastern disco inspired stuff – it was like our own version of a weird, theatrical disco. We started that process very casually, but then Andrew had this feeling that he wanted to turn it all into a folk record.”

Whiteman was deeply immersed in Notley’s contemporary poetic masterpiece at the time – a stark, brooding tome about a woman dealing with the ramifications of Hepatitis C – and one day it just struck him.

“The writing is incredible,” says Engel. “There were these beautiful fragments of old folk and blues and gospel tucked inside the poetry. He was reading it all the time and eventually it cued him to want to re-translate the poetry back into a folk song. Kind of like a completion of the cycle.”

The record is a grab-bag of psychological distress and elation. It swerves and swivels from anxious mania to beautifully morose eulogies of former lives and lies.

Sonically, the record is lush and haunting, a beautiful by-product of working with the wizard of wistful indie rock, Sandro Perri.

“Andrew had just introduced me to Sandro’s music,” says Engel. “He had just put out this wonderful new record and a friend of ours was briefly working with him. His name was just coming up all the time and his aesthetic really appealed to us… so we just reached out to him and he was very receptive.”

Like the lyrical content, much of the instrumentation draws on nostalgia to fulfill a bizarre, disjointed desire for reinvention and revisiting.

“A lot of the gear was contemporary, but the MIDI sounds we used were from like 1975,” says Engel. “We have a bank of sounds from Black Sabbath’s first record. It was partly that we needed to be able to work within a certain type of framework and have certain kinds of restraints. It was kind of like a weird challenge,” she says, explaining the eclectic and mishmash nature of the album.

Though the two are inseparably intertwined in many ways, it took a few meetings for the pair to mesh and start pursuing music together.

“We started collaborating because the first time we re-met. Andrew had been given this fretless goatskin thing… and I had consumed just enough alcohol to impromptu sing across this noodling he was doing and I just had a great feeling about this collaboration. We didn’t start really making music until a couple years ago, though. I made music in Montreal for a while while he did in Toronto. But then he moved to Montreal and we started spending a lot of time together. We listened to a lot of music together – like a lot of music together – and it all just happened very organically and beautifully.”

For such an intricate and involved record, Engel thinks that the songs do well in a live setting and the manic and frantic energy of the live set makes for a mesmerizing show.

“It’s compelling for people to see just the two of us doing these songs,” she says. “We both play guitar and we have his Roland sampler that we trigger- it’s not like tracks that play throughout, we use it like it’s an instrument – which it is. It’s compelling to see that we’re doing this really live, really raw thing. It’s definitely not phoned in.”

After the duo returns exhausted from their whirlwind North American tour, Whiteman says they’ll settle back down for a while and try and churn out another album.

“We come back, and we’re going to have this big Montreal show and a huge Quebec tour – we’re actually scheduled to be on the road until mid-November, so we’re pretty busy – but as soon as we’re home we’ll be working on some new stuff.”

Poetic, intricate and wonderfully chock-full of meta-referencing, AroarA dazzle and bewilder with a sly mixture of wit, wiles and wonder.

Catch AroarA at the Palomino (Calgary) on September 17, Avenue Theatre (Edmonton) on September 18 and Park Theatre (Winnipeg) on September 20.

By Nick Laugher
Photo: Adrienne Amato and Michael Baumgart