Kaleb Nathaniel Hikele was born in the Canadian residence of St. Thomas, Ontario, in March of 1990. This city would be home to Kaleb’s humble small town life until he left for Toronto on his own in 2008. In his earlier years, Kaleb and his family were unsettled, having moved five times before he was a teenager and finally landing in and around the small neighborhood of Lynhurst just as Kaleb’s musical ambitions grew.
Kaleb was first involved with music in 1995, when he was only five years old and began to take piano and voice lessons in the city. He would immediately become a part of a show choir that performed Broadway and Classical music in the region and first performed on the piano publicly in 1998 at a Christmas recital. Competitions and festivals would be a place of annual attendance for Kaleb as he studied the piano and began to compose his own music at his young age.
Inspired by Romantic and Baroque composers, Kaleb was fascinated with the world of classical music, with very little attention put towards the reading sheet music and more of his natural ability focused on listening to and interpreting these pieces of music. He would work towards his Grade 8 examination with the Royal Conservatory of Music, which he completed at the age of 15 when he was two years into highschool in St. Thomas. By this time, Kaleb was already part of a rock quartet and was self-taught on the electric guitar, bass and drums.
The guitar was not of particular interest to Kaleb until he was recommended the instrument by a friend on the schoolyard- this lead to two short months of guitar lessons before he pioneered towards the practice of teaching himself guitar techniques and styles. Almost simultaneously, he formed a band with two musicians in his class, who at the tail end of their Grade 7 year would begin to cover material and aspire to write their own songs. One of Hikele’s first original songs, ‘Nothing To Hide’, was first previewed on the Southwold Public School stage during a one-off concert at the afternoon school dance.
What started out as a pop-punk trio “Hit & Run”, which grew into “Ahead of Nothing”, continued through their last year of public school with minimal shows at their school dances and indoor skate parks. When highschool was approaching and musical direction was reshaping, in a quick decision to speed up the tempo and channel aggression through their music, ‘Ahead of Nothing ‘ members Zack Buck and Kaleb Hikele would construct a brand new band with local musicians Ryan Kline and Jordan Jones in August of 2004.
The four-piece rock outfit had naturally gravitated towards the scream-rock sound of the early 2000’s, which was quickly building in popularity in their city and amongst their group of friends, when they debuted in Jordan’s basement for a house party. The name “The Leftbehinds” promoted the band for a few months into their Grade 9 year and only one show- the band played their first rock bar set at the notorious run-down venue in London, Ontario, called “The Embassy Hotel”.
In September of 2004, at 14 years old, the band was ready to record and re-named the group before releasing a four song self-titled EP- “Far From Freedom”. A one day recording session took place in a small room in London, Ontario, with an off-the-floor approach to the rough edged scream-punk disc. The band sold the music off stage and out of their lockers at school, while an audience escorted the band around town to shows and festivals.
In 2005, after the band stirred the local music scene with their live shows, the band returned to the studio to create a second EP by multi-tracking and over-dubbing instrumentals, releasing it in handmade quantities as a self-titled album once again. Being one of the few bands in the city of St. Thomas playing and recording original material, Far From Freedom was making waves around town when musical differences saw them abruptly come to a disbanding in June of 2006.
The spirit of Far From Freedom was kept alive through 2006 as Kaleb continued to write material and move towards the prospect of a new band. A new in-box portable recording machine was setup in the basement rehearsal space of Far From Freedom just before they’d ended, so this started to become an exciting way for Kaleb and Zack to learn the art of home recording independently. A new idea for a project and a one-off highschool talent show performance came about when a local guitarist named Bob Ward joined Kaleb and Zack on stage to play two cover songs infront of the students of Parkside C.I. at the end of 2006.
The trio was well received and after a few short months the three musicians instinctively knew they should form a band- the name “The Capitol” was derived from a newly renovated movie theatre uptown in St. Thomas, and the band started to write and perform in the city at the dawn of 2007. Frequent concerts were held at the school, in the cafeteria and courtyard, and by June the trio was ready to release what would be their one and only full length album- appropriately titled “Far From Freedom”.
The Capitol performed live and recorded their music with restricted instrumentation, usually playing with only a drum kit, guitar, and a piano played by Kaleb, substituted with a guitar occasionally. ‘The Capitol’ album was all engineered by the band on the Boss BR-1600 machine that sat in their rehearsal space. Without any formal recording training, the album was the definition of an independent release and was hand packaged and sold in the halls and off the stage of their shows. The album accompanied their frequent shows in St. Thomas, London, and a single show in Toronto at The Opera House in the new year. As the end of highschool faced members of the band, a natural dissolution to the trio came when, unknown to them at the time, they played their last concert in St. Thomas in the summer of 2008- after this, all practices and shows seemingly came to a end.
Behind the presentation of ‘The Capitol’, Kaleb Hikele was writing his own material that would end up debuting on his own solo albums through 2007 and 2008 while he was still living at home. Soon after The Capitol’s “Far From Freedom” was released, Kaleb was faced with the event of his Father’s house being demolished in July, to build a new foundation in the following months. This pushed him into his basement bedroom to create an album before the demolition, to be his first solo release, which would be recorded solely on the Boss BR-1600.
To thicken the sound on the album, Kaleb resorted to playing all of the instrumentals heard on his own- this approach would carry on for years and become a signature style of recording. All of Kaleb’s post-Capitol compositions were featured on solo albums from that point on, debuting on his first solo album in July, and another release at the end of the year called “The Second Time Around”. These albums were released in very limited numbers, the second being an exclusive selection of music recorded for the crowds flooding to Kaleb’s newly developed ‘Open Mic’ drama room concerts.
The summer of 2008 saw a real transition period as The Capitol lineup dissolved and plans to move out of the city to Toronto were approaching. After graduating Grade 12, he found himself with more than a dozen songs and no specific direction. He compiled the music into one recording effort that took place over two weeks in July, deep in his newly built basement bedroom in Lynhurst. The project was experimental and varied in instrumentation and musical style, amounting to three minutes under an hour of music by the end of the sessions. After it was finished, efforts to officially release it were diminished and the album was not given a name or an album cover. Despite being burned into a few copies for friends in town, the music did not see the light of day and was buried when Kaleb moved to Toronto in September.
In 2008, when Kaleb found a small apartment to live in the north end of Toronto, he took to songwriting in a new environment and went to a music college for the next year. The acoustic guitar became the leading tool for his songwriting, which compiled to a folk-infused collection of music by the end of his schooling. When he arrived in the city, he took to the stage to perform as a solo artist, playing more than a dozen venues in town in his first year- The Horseshoe Tavern, The Opera House, Rivoli, Hard Rock Cafe, Cameron House, Hugh’s Room and others.
In January of 2009, Kaleb appeared on stage for the first time as “The Sun Harmonic”, a stage moniker that evolved through a revelation early in the year. A few hours of recording time towards a studio north of Toronto brought Kaleb to record the roots of his new songs off-the-floor in March. A month later, he went to a church studio space in Hamilton to record the remaining original songs, which he planned to use as a foundation for another one-man-band project. Incorporating a cellist, saxophone, and playing the remaining instruments on his own, he finished the album in the college studio rooms and for the first time ever had his album ‘mastered’. He decided to debut his new stage pseudonym with the release of the album, so he left the album self-titled as “The Sun Harmonic”. The album cover was adorned with a simple penned signature beside the negative of a famous 1919 photograph of a solar eclipse.
In the summer of 2009, a townhouse unit went up for rent in the east side of downtown Toronto. Kaleb moved into the Riverdale East neighborhood with plans to build a recording studio in the basement of the house alongside a college friend, Dirk Boon. By the end of October, the studio was painted, soundproofed, filled with all styles of instruments, and local musician Matt Morgan was welcomed to record the first album from the studio- his “Big Open Window” release was recorded and produced by the studio engineers of the lengthy titled “The Townhouse Recording Facility & Sound Studio”. The space soon became home to all of Kaleb’s own recordings as well as other Canadian independents, like Alex Beraldo, The Breaks, Driftwood, Reed Holland, and others.
Then came the first project to be constructed by “The Sun Harmonic” at the newly built facility: It was conceptualized to be a collection of recordings with varied genres and sonic diversity, which was embodied from songs like “Ready To Flood”, a psychedelic rock song, to “The Morning Breaks”, a folk-pop ballad, and “Speak Quiet”, a folk lullaby. Visually supported by the nearby landscape of the Don Valley Parkway, a photograph of the highway was captured to grace the cover of 2010’s art-rock release- “Chemistry”. This album was fully produced and engineered, orchestrated and performed by Kaleb at ‘The Townhouse’.
Not long after its release in May, Kaleb began a creative songwriting project initiated by the onset of summer weather, which lead him to finish 11 somewhat-freeform songs in the month. On the 2nd of August, Kaleb retreated to his studio to record one of these songs, ‘Apology’, as a painful goodbye and dedication to a lost loved one. Over the next two nights before leaving the city for a funeral, each of the 11 songs were performed live-off-the-floor in the studio to create an extremely intimate and sincere acoustic record. Without a single overdub, the recordings were kept true to their original takes, and the album was compiled to be released in November of 2010, simply titled “Season”.
This is where the story continues to be written… a hard rock album, a collection of piano songs, and other songwriting projects are in the works, but that is for you to hear and watch unveil as it happens… Stay in tune. Listen. Thank you.
