Heather Duby is a singer songwriter from Portland, although resident in Seattle since 1994, who is inspired by the most eccentric voices of rock music (Nico, Enya, Galas, Mitchell, Bjork) for her erudite and surreal songs, often arranged in an even more eccentric manner.
It's the orchestration, due to the collaboration with producer Steve Fisk, which is at the core of Post To Wire (Subpop, 1999): the strong rumbling of the bass, the fragile filigrees of the electronics, the exotic rhythms, the agonizing timbres of the guitars. In the meantime, the singer weds Nico's ceremonial music to Enya's visions. Judith, sung in Enya's delicate contralto and punctuated by a trip-hop rhythm, relies on a loud bass riff and the counterpoint of an out of tune string section. Kensington Place, in true Nico style, displays a horror melody on the harmonium and spectral rings of piano. The effect is halfway between a greek tragedy and trip-hop. Falter, accompanied by a minimalist carillon at the synth and a psychedelic organ in the distance, is archetipical of her superbly delicate litanies which fade away in magic reverbs. For Jeffrey, possibly the emotional apex, ia a madrigal in Enya's style, with Duby's voice overdubbed so as to sound like a many-part choral song, sustained by a wild crescendo of african tribal drumming and underscored by a fragile new age melody at the keyboards. The psychic nadir of the album may be represented by September, a slow and sleepy elegy sung in Enya's most "eclesiastic" register.
Moments of happiness are rare. The most upbeat song is You Loved Me, which boasts a Todd Rundgren-like soul leitmotiv. A Healthy Fear Of Monsters is a novelty, halfway between a waltz and a calypso.
Duby's show ends here, because the album's last three songs are mere experiments in studio production. In Halo Sky, possibly the album's masterpiece, keyboards and percussions join in a grotesque dance, the rhythm takes off, the voice is fragmented in galactic echoes; in Soulflower and Amygdala there is no singing as such, as the voice is reduced to a sound and the singer wails at random: rhythm (in the former) and keyboards (in the latter) prevail.
Duby's voice and lyrics, not to mention her suave melodies, are worth the price of the CD, but, combined with Fisk's scores, they become powerful tools for a psycoanalysis of manic depression and the quest for the absolute, in Nico's footsteps.

The EP Elemental (Subpop, 2001) documents the supergroup led by Steve Fisk and Heather Duby that includes a saxophonist and a turntablist. The music elaborates on the fusion of dub, hip-hop, funk, jazz and electronica that has been offered by several artists over the previous few years. Duby's voice becomes an accessory for the high-tech shuffle What You Thought and the dancefloor locomotive From Here To Gone, something like a disco diva for Fisk's scores. So much so that we find her crooning a mellow, sensual soul ballad like Love You More. And she's out of the picture in the drum'n'bass and dub monster Terrabyte, possibly the standout. Not an Heather Duby EP, despite the credits.

Duby later recorded Come Across The River (2003) Heather Duby (2006), Latency (2011), and Undone (2020).