The Goller out of Bass

Why do so many people take their young kids to Costa in Tesco?  Do they think it's like a great day out?  Do they think it's designed for crawling and running up and down?  Unwarranted grouse, I admit, but it gets on my tits, I'm just trying to do the crossword quietly after my shopping.

This was a really good gig, though I confess I was done with it about 20 minutes before the 72 minutes were up.

RUTH GOLLER - OCM, Holywell Music Room, 15/2/22

Some musical combinations just feel right, no matter how many times they’re heard: power trio; string quartet; bebop five-piece; “three MCs and one DJ”, as the Beasties put it. But there’s plenty of scope for new or atypical ensembles, and tonight Ruth Goller from Melt Yourself Down and Acoustic Ladyland - though perhaps most celebrated round these parts as a member of the excellent Bug Prentice - presents her album Skylla using a bass guitar and three vocalists: this makes sense if you know that Skylla, or more commonly Scylla in English, was a multi-headed monster from Greek myth.  The folk-horror angle is amplified by the band’s decision to wear head-dresses that look like stylised animal skulls adorned with black feathers, as if they’re the Summerisle choral society.

The vocals are fascinatingly fragmented, each of the three singers often delivering single words, or even dissected phonemes or disconnected mouth effects, rather than fluid melodic lines. This creates a mysterious pointillist effect, a haze of individual vocal moments hanging in the air, or overlapping, more like a Cubist version of a single singer than any traditional chamber choir.  This method fleetingly brings to mind many varied reference points, from the Stockhausen of Hymnen, to early Laurie Anderson, to Funkstörung’s Björk remixes, to an undead Swingle Singers trudging into a dessicated wassail. Sometimes, however, the voices come together to deliver a melody in close harmony, and the effect is shocking, like a blurred and jumbled image snapping briefly into focus: the line “you left too soon, I lost my soul” feels especially chilling. The bass tends to keep in the background, generally adding little clusters of harmonics behind the skein of voices, but there are stretches of solo work, which can sound like a wall of NYC loft guitar, or snippets of cues from a 70s spy movie, or even a first wave grunge bassist trying to play like Ornette Coleman.

The monster Scylla is most famous when paired with Charybdis, a deadly whirlpool, and to be “between Scylla and Charybdis” means you’re treading a dangerous path. In a way Goller is doing just this, presenting what is effectively a solid 75-minute piece which often feels more like the floating space debris from an exploded song than a cohesive whole, but ultimately Goller and her supremely talented vocal trio navigate this tricky route, doubtless to continue their musical odyssey elsewhere.