Ruth Goller: ‘I learnt to trust my instincts a bit more’

Now at last she’s stepped out as a band leader in her own right, fronting Skylla, who are named after an album she released last year.

The impetus for the record stemmed from an invitation Goller received to provide a track for a monthly mixtape called This Is Our Music. “It could have been anything, like a rehearsal recording or something you put together at home, just something that hadn’t been released before,” she says on a visit to the Italian Alps, where she grew up before moving to England to study music.

“I sat down as I was coming back from a flight from a gig somewhere and took my bass out, it was completely de-tuned from the holding locker, and I started playing around with harmonics. The tuning it had, I quite liked it, so I just put a mic in front of it and started recording some stuff, and after that I put some vocals on it because it was just me, I didn’t have any other musicians around.

“I just sounded really fresh and I really liked it and I gave it to the person who was doing the mixtape and he loved it and said, ‘why don’t you do something similar over the whole year?’ So I did one track per month and at the end of it I thought ‘I’ve got an album here and I’m going to release it’.”

Goller took inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including Bulgarian folk, free jazz and music from the South Tyrol region. “It’s such instinctive music and I didn’t really think about it,” she says. “It comes out of improvisation as well and all your influences come out. I listen to very varied types of music, not just jazz. I listen to a lot of folk music from all over the place and I like going out in nature a lot, I go on a lot of walks. I think all of that stuff comes out when you embrace improvisation.”

She shares vocal duties in Skylla with professional singers Lauren Kinsella and Alice Grant. “I’m not really a trained singer, I’ve sung backing vocals but I never saw myself as a proper singer,” she explains. “What happened was somebody asked me to do it live and it was difficult because there’s so many layers of vocals so I thought the only way I can do this live was to invite other singers to do it with me. What I liked about it was not one of us in then at the front, all three voices create one sound, so that was a really nice idea.

“Having them there as well gave me a bit of freedom to concentrate more on the bass playing. Also it really opened the music up in a live setting because they’re such great improvisers as well so I wanted to embrace that onstage and take it further than what the record is.”

As a bassist, Goller has a particular interest in harmonics. “There’s something about the sound I always like about harmonics,” she says. “I’m not a huge Jaco Pastorius fan in the sense of his sound, I’m quite a minimalist bass-playing person so his playing was always a little too busy for me, but the stuff he does with harmonics I always really loved. That definitely is in there, whether I’m aware of it or not.”

She feels Skylla has helped her “to really develop as a composer” and to understand how she writes best. “Definitely writing in a spontaneous way and not overthinking things is the purest way music comes out for me,” she says. “Making decisions quickly, just moving forward with it. Yes, doing some editing afterwards, taking out bits that maybe you don’t like so much, but just to capture that train of thought that you have. I think with this record my way of writing changed a lot because of going through this process and it worked really well for me.

“Also as a person, I learnt to trust my instincts a bit more and not overthink things too much. I think all of us don’t do that enough, you’ll worry about what does this person think. It’s all distractions to me. I’m much more spontaneous now and will make a decision and live with it. If it’s not something I like five years down the line then it’s still something in that moment I really liked so it’s as valid as anything else.”

Goller has very much found a kindred spirit in Pete Wareham, who she has worked with in Acoustic Ladyland and Melt Yourself Down. She believes they had “a similar upbringing” musically. “We both grew up listening to punk and rock and then got into jazz as well and kind of saw the connections between the two,” she says. “For me it was a big thing hearing John Coltrane. I got into jazz quite late, I only heard that kind of music when I was in my 20s. It was a big realisation, and realising the genre to me was kind of the same thing, it was just different instruments, but I didn’t have any of that baggage of what jazz is. It was just music that had a very similar attitude of freedom and pureness and rawness, like punk music; I think Pete would see things the same way, that’s why we connect so well.”

As a performer, Goller certainly missed live concerts during the pandemic. “For a year and a half I didn’t really do any concerts at all,” she says. “It was a very dark period of my life, to be honest, a lot of questions, what am I, what does it mean to be a musician, is it enough to practice at home or do I actually have to play for people? I did ask myself a lot of questions like that because there was also the not knowing of whether we will ever be able to play again, for me that was a big fear because I can’t really do anything else. I’m 41 now and the thought of having to start again in a completely different profession was really daunting, some I’m glad that it’s slightly different now.”

Ruth Goller’s Skylla play at B Side Leeds on February 11, The Yellow Arch, Sheffield on March 24 and Hyde Park Book Club, Leeds on April 22. www.ruthgoller.com