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.
