Over the past two decades you might have seen Italian-born bassist Ruth Goller playing with dozens of line-ups at the punkier end of London’s jazz and improv scene. She’s performed with Acoustic Ladyland, Melt Yourself Down, Sons of Kemet and Let Spin, and featured with artists as diverse as Alabaster DePlume, Marc Ribot, Rokia Traoré and Damon Albarn, usually playing intricate, wiry basslines on her short-scale Mustang bass guitar, using a plectrum.
This solo project, however, sees her creating a very different sonic world. Here she taps out repeated, hypnotic patterns on a detuned bass to create haunting harmonics – dull, resonant, unearthly clangs that can sound like gamelans, temple gongs or steel pans. She also sings: her first album as leader, 2021’s Skylla, saw her harmonising with Alice Grant and Lauren Kinsella, but here Goller handles all the vocal duties herself, multi-tracking audacious, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares-style harmonies to create a series of slightly demented nursery rhymes.
She’s backed by a different percussionist on each track. Tom Skinner rumbles inventively under the microtonal harmonies of the eerie, poetic opener, Below My Skin; Mark Sanders provides shimmering, horror-movie cymbals for the major-key chant Reach Down Into the Deepest White; Max Andrzejewski from the Berlin-based band Hütte plays sketchy, textural drums on the gorgeous chorale All The Light I Have, I Hand To You. Sometimes Goller switches to bowed double bass, sawing underneath the hymnal She Was My Own, She Was Myself (featuring Bex Burch on kalimbas); sometimes she reverts to her hardcore punk roots: How to Be Free From It sets her alongside Emanuele Maniscalco, better known as an ECM pianist, but here playing the role of a brutal thrash-metal drummer. Throughout, Goller and guests create a world that is childlike, beatific and slightly terrifying.
Also out this month
Panoptikon (XKatedral) by Swedish sound composer Maria W Horn is a site-specific recording made in a disused prison. Featuring a choral quartet and organ drones, it is an expansive yet austere work which explores notions of confinement, claustrophobia, solitude and torture, particularly on the title track’s throbbing Gregorian electronica. Daniel Herskedal is a Norwegian composer and tuba player whose intriguing album A Single Sunbeam (Edition Records) starts like a colliery band playing in ultra-slow-motion and slowly mutates into a Peter Gabriel-ish investigation of ritualistic rhythms, unusual vocal effects and ambient soundscapes, played at sludge-rock tempo. Saxophonist Rachel Musson has made a name on London’s free improv scene, but her compelling new album Ashes and Dust, Earth and Sky (Lludw a Llwch, Daear a Nef) sets ambient drones, narrative tenor sax solos and harmonised horn arrangements against field recordings made in London and west Wales.
