Ruth Goller’s “SKYLLUMINA” sounds like folk music from an imaginary country, or from a country that will exist, somewhere, in the future. Music that actually feels like a discovery, like you’re finding a work of art that no one else has witnessed before. Music from a time before music was music. There’s not much like it. “SKYLLUMINA” is a strikingly inventive album, composed of Goller’s singing, her bass playing, and various forms of percussion. Goller sings many of these songs like hymns, devotions, or lamentations that she’s compelled to create and issue—sounding like she’s channeling a broader and deeper force than personal, individual sentiment, and more like serving as a conduit for older, primitive feelings of awe, love, terror, grief, anger.
“Below my skin,” the first track on the album, showcases it all: Goller’s airy, layered vocals; incredible drumming from Tom Skinner; Goller’s twitchy, provocative bass harmonics. She opens the track with a soft, wordless cry that rises and falls. Skinner adds texture throughout the whole track, doing some little business in the background, cymbal tapping, drum rolls, short patterns. Goller’s bass harmonics sound so unearthly at times, some odd mechanism summoned into being. It’s Goller’s singing that drives this track and the album as a whole. She stacks up these layers of her bright, soft voice until it all feels so heavy, like most of each song is voice, emerging from different directions, travelling to different destinations.
“Next time I keep my hands down” is another stunner. This one really highlights a move that Goller does really well when she’s singing—she holds a note, but then extends it to swoop up or down to another note, like a little calligraphic flourish. It’s such a great and surprising effect, and she uses it on this song to stretch out a slow, pretty melody. One of the most beautiful moments on the album, for me, happens when Goller sings, “I am/made of time/as we/all know,” from about 1:16 in the track to about 2:07. It feels so delicate and immediate.
A special mention for “She was my own she was myself,” which is also staggeringly gorgeous. This song has Goller’s most straightforward singing on the album, accompanied mostly by her double bass playing, and then a little stream of notes that flow from Bex Burch’s sanza and llimba. It seems like Goller sings on this track about not revealing herself fully, hiding, shielding herself from the world. “When you ask me who I am, I will tell you, now I won’t” and “Don’t ask me who I am, because she is for real, she was my own, she was myself.” Cannot stress enough how beautiful this song is, and how wildly it flows into “How to be free from it,” which has the hardest beginning of any song on the album, with big beats and growling bass.
A totally fascinating and bewilderingly enjoyable album, the kind of music that makes your ears sort of involuntarily perk up, like you’re half-hearing something far away.