Rising Folk/Roots Group Aruna & the Sirens Release “Have You Seen My Sister?”
Responding to what the UN dubbed the “Shadow Pandemic,” Bath, Ontario-based band Aruna & the Sirens have released an anthem calling attention to the global surge in gender-based violence.
“Have You Seen My Sister?” starts strong with powerhouse vocals from songwriter Aruna Antonella Handa with harmonies by band members Alejandra Ballon, Caitlin Holland, and Lindsay McDonald. The song’s first line is a call to action: Won’t you remind me to wonder who’s missing from the corridors of privilege?”
Aruna & The Sirens is an acoustic band with original songs spanning genres, including folk, classical, and jazz. The band has performed at clubs such as the Monarch and the Burdock in Toronto and has made appearances at festivals, including Nuit Blanche, Canadian Music Week, and Open Tuning. They plan to release their first LP in the coming months.
Handa’s vocals are reminiscent of Tracy Chapman and Janis Joplin, while the Sirens’ voices lift the sound with soaring harmonies. The band asks the listener to consider the relationship between a lack of power and disproportionate representation in incidents of violence.
The track transitions as the vocals and other instruments drop out, allowing the cello played by Grammy-nominated Dave Eggar to take the spotlight, creating a sense of wind and motion. This shift in tone suits the lyrics of the final part of the track, as the song reminds listeners of the various roles women play in our lives and how profound that loss can be.
Accompanying the vocals is the band’s rhythm section, with Raphael Roter on drums and Chris Adriaanse on upright bass. In addition to Tennessee-based Eggar on cello, among the many guest artists are Ontario-based Doug Tielli on acoustic guitar and Boston-based Antje Duvekot, providing further vocals.
The track is a collaborative effort with contributions from artists from the US, Mexico, and Canada. In 2020, when Handa read about the Shadow Pandemic, fueled by increased alcohol consumption and people trapped in lockdown with their aggressors, she reached out to New York-based friend and producer David Seitz, whose credits include work with Moby, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen.
Handa and Seitz were working on the band’s debut full-length record at that time. They discussed the possibility of creating a socially distanced, collaborative recording of selections from Handa’s song cycle “Have You Seen My Sister.” The project was partially funded by a grant from FACTOR Canada.
Listen to “Have You Seen My Sister?” below and learn more about Aruna & The Sirens via our mini-interview.
Care to introduce yourself?
We are Aruna & the Sirens. We’ve been playing mostly in Toronto since 2018. I met vocalists Caitlin Holland, Alejandra Ballon, and Lindsay McDonald on the street when they sang together with me in my all-night installation of Have You Seen My Sister for Nuit Blanche Toronto. I met Raphael Roter (drums) and Chris Adriaanse (upright bass) at improvisation jam sessions held at the now-closed Gallery 345. I was so impressed by their ability to intuit and anticipate the musicians they’d play with, and while I loved playing with them, I also really loved listening to them. And we jelled, overlapping genres of folk, post-punk, opera, country, jazz, Motown, chanson, and roots in songs about crickets, elephants, canoes, heartbreak, solastalgia, addiction, dystopia, cellophane, and time.
I love vocals and sang in choirs and ensembles, and my first band was an acappella band called Catchpenny. I didn’t come out as a songwriter until much later. I had been writing poems and improvising wordless melodies and despite that, when I deliberately tried to put the two together, I did not like the result. It was when I started working on the Addiction collection of songs that I started to like the songs I was writing. That song cycle began life as a collection of poems and forms the bulk of the material on our upcoming LP Of Bones & Addicts.
Tell us about the process of writing “Have You Seen My Sister.”
I had wanted to work on something about gender-based violence. Much of my work is inspired by what Noam Chomsky calls Orwell’s problem: “How do we do so little when we know so much?” I felt frustrated that so little gets done about this human rights violation.
Originally, I contacted American folk musician Holly Near to ask her if I could adapt her song “Hay Una Mujer” about the disappeared women in Chile. I had covered that song with my band Catchpenny and loved it. Holly graciously gave permission, and she also strongly recommended that I write my own songs on this topic.
I decided to compose street protest songs, i.e., easy to learn, easy to harmonize, songs that could sound good acappella. I wrote four songs for this song cycle: two were scored and form the basis of the recording we’ve just released, and two are largely instructions for improvised pieces: “Away,” in which soloists improvise a melody on the name of women who have disappeared, and “Gone” in which the names of the women who have been murdered in gender-based violence are recited against a backdrop of bell-like vocalizations. We recently performed the entire song cycle in Toronto, once at the Heliconian Hall, Canada’s oldest women’s arts and letters club, and a second time accompanied by the Big Bang Ensemble, conducted by Christine Duncan at the Women From Space festival.
What’s it like being a musician in Bath?
Too early to say. My band is based in Toronto, and so far, I’ve been traveling back for gigs. I moved here to the village of Bath in December, sight unseen, on the recommendation of a friend of a friend. I live in a former classroom in a historic schoolhouse with huge windows looking onto Lake Ontario, so lots of bliss here. Bath is the home of what the locals affectionately call the Hip House (Bathhouse Studios owned by the Tragically Hip). So, who knows? Check back in a bit?
Who was the first Canadian artist to blow you away?
Hmm. I’ve been blown away so many times. I love good songwriting, and I love huge dynamic voices. So, I guess I would say, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Feron, Scott Merrit and Jane Siberry were among the first to blow me away in terms of songwriting. In terms of voices and presence, Burton Cummings in The Guess Who, David Clayton Thomas in Blood, Sweat and Tears, KD Lang, and Alanis Morissette come to mind.
I remain in a state of awe at Canadian talent. Love Mama’s Broke, Toronto’s Joshanda, Doug Tielli, and the list goes on and on.
You’ve been making music for a short bit now. What’s one piece of advice you can offer to those starting out?
Maybe I would say this: discover your strengths and play to them. Keep at it. Don’t worry if you don’t sound like everyone else or anyone else.