By PAUL CANTIN --

As singer Jane Siberry lazily kayaked across the pristine waters of an isolated education retreat on the B.C. coast recently, she noticed she was under surveillance.

"These dark hemispheres were rising in the water and slowly going down. I get paranoid," she says back ashore. It turns out the hemispheres were simply curious seals. But lately, Siberry has had to get used to being under close scrutiny.

Just over a year ago, she walked away from her long-standing pact with Warner Music and set up her own record company, Sheeba, which markets her work almost exclusively through the World Wide Web.

Artists not quite as bold as Siberry have been sitting back and watching to see how she'll fare outside the corporate cocoon.

"I'm being watched, because if I can make it happen, they may try it themselves," says Siberry, who performs at Barrymore's tonight.

Anyone who has observed her experience with Sheeba can see that it is a demanding undertaking that is now starting to pay creative dividends.

"I was pretty pleased to realize the phones are still working," she says of Sheeba's first birthday.

"The office was pretty well closed for quite a while. I learned a lot about efficiency and streamlining as I started out. I'm hoping we learned a lot more. It has been a valuable year."

Sheeba's release of a planned live, career-spanning trilogy got hung up in legal problems. The ensuing battle almost caused Siberry to cancel the whole project. If she ever needed proof that going indie was a good idea, that was it.

"It was a real shock. There was a clause in my old Warner Bros. contract that I had no right to record my own material that they had in their catalogue. It's standard. But they went to the nth degree, showing where their priorities were. So it was pretty eye-opening," she says.

The legal quagmire has been solved, and the first instalment of the live triptych should be out at Christmas. More immediate plans include a mini-album called A Day In The Life, a kind of audio-documentary peek into Siberry's world. Then, she'll issue a book called Clownliness Is Next To Godliness, and she's also working on songs for another record -- all of it will eventually be available through her website.

"Anything I can think of, I can make happen, I can do," she says of Sheeba-dom.

"I won't be tempted by approval or having to rev up a huge machine for a wonderful little thing."