PROFILE
Jane Aurora
By Andrew King
Jane Aurora credits the thriving and supportive music scene in her
hometown as the foundation for the successful, multi-disciplined
career she’s carved out for herself over the years. Now, from her home
base on the other side of the world from where she started, she’s
building a different kind of support system to help other women and
non-binary-identifying studio pros follow in her footsteps.
Currently based in British Columbia, Aurora was born in Ballarat,
Australia, about an hour west of Melbourne. “In our town of 80,000
people, we had six venues with live original music three-plus nights
a week,” she enthuses. “I started gigging when I was 13 and teaching
guitar at the local music store when I was 15.”
Her first recording experience came around 1996 when she cut
demos for her trio, Gertrude, to four-track and tape. Over the ensuing
years, she honed her skills working on her own music, first in Ballarat
in the late ‘90s and then in studios across Australia, North America,
Europe, and India while touring with her roots-fusion outfit, Aurora
Jane & Massive Change, throughout the aughts.
“My passion for the studio really grew during the making of my
album Universal Language with [co-producer] Sam Bartlett,” she says,
recalling the sessions for the 2006 effort. A few years later, she cut
a solo record, Deep End, with Tony Buchen (Courtney Barnett, The
Church) as her co-producer and simultaneously started to work with
other artists around Melbourne.
“I began to understand and fall in love with analog gear, and was
lucky enough to learn a lot from working alongside Tony, then Robin
Mai,” she says of another revered Australian producer, who boasts
credits with Nick Cave and John Butler Trio.
She worked at Alt. Music Group’s Melbourne HQ for a couple
of years before moving to Vancouver, where she’s been working
consistently out of various studios ever since.
Beyond sessions with her clients, Aurora has a pair of major
projects underway that have her quite excited. One is establishing
Capsule Studios – her innovative, “portable” workspace built within
a shipping container and drawn up in collaboration with accom-
plished studio designer Chris Potter. “Working within this confined
space required some serious creative problem solving,” she admits.
“The studio features a control room and booth, and it’s ideal for my
workflow. I track beds in studios around the city, then do all the
detailed overdubs, vocals, and mix in the portable space.”
The goal is to have the studio open to the public within the
next few months, and she expects it to generate a lot of attention.
“We believe it’s the most sophisticated container studio design to
date, and look forward to showcasing the prototype to the audio
community.”
The other is the Producer’s Lounge, a program that Aurora is
spearheading in tandem with other music industry stakeholders
in B.C. to elevate women and non-binary-identifying studio pros
through a series of workshops, mentoring sessions, and more. In
fact, a recent Producer’s Lounge event with the iconic Sylvia Massy
(Prince, Tool) at Vancouver’s Warehouse Studios sits near the top of
her list of career highlights to date.
“Alongside her mind-blowing discography, she’s well-known for
her passion for recording in unexpected places,” Aurora says, which
made for some very engaging discourse during her visit to Vancou-
ver. “I’m currently cooking up a plan to take her to India,” she adds,
which alludes to some of her other memorable career moments that
came while touring throughout India every year between 2004 and
2010 with Massive Change.
“We had some epic ‘70s-style, six-bands-on-a-bus tours through
remote parts of the country, playing to cricket stadiums of 20,000
people, sometimes in absurd monsoon conditions,” she recalls. “We
always delivered despite electrocution, road blocks, and bus hijack-
ing.” She met countless talented musicians and creative types in the
process, and even got to attend a private concert at the home of
the incomparable Ravi Shankar.
“My passion for recording is really an extension of my musician-
ship,” she muses. “I love the timelessness of making great recordings.
I think a lot of people choose to work with me because I’m a multi-
instrumentalist as well as an engineer and producer, yet mixing is
my absolute favourite, and I attribute that to a passion for cooking
and perfect flavour-combining!”
While she admits her life is, at this point, largely governed by her
work, she enjoys indulging her culinary muse and taking advantage
of the beauty and bounty of her adopted home province as often as
she can. She and her partner reside in Vancouver’s Strathcona neigh-
bourhood and enjoy taking in live music, good films, and travelling.
“Outside of that, it’s food,” she says. “We love cooking, and sourcing
wild and foraged local ingredients for meals. I feel like, moving to
B.C., I lucked out with the abundance of salmon, raspberries, and
moose meat in my life.”
Thanks to her growing profile and the success of the Producer’s
Lounge’s pilot 2019 season, there’s a lot to look forward to for Aurora
leading into and throughout 2020. One thing is the launch of a Pro-
ducer’s Lounge podcast, the first episode of which drops in October
and features a conversation with Massy and Canadian producer
Howard Redekopp from a recent in-studio event.
She’s a long way from where she started – both figuratively and
literally – but Aurora isn’t resting on her laurels; instead, she’s push-
ing her career to higher and higher plateaus while helping other
aspiring artists do the same.
Andrew King is the Editor-in-Chief of Professional Sound.
18 PROFESSIONAL SOUND