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Ruth Goller: Skyllumina review – jazz bassist enters beatific and slightly terrifying new sonic world
In this solo project the stalwart of London’s jazz and improv scene is joined by a rolling cast of percussionists to create hypnotic, haunting patterns and demented nursery rhymes
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. 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.
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