Music / contemporary music
Review: Skylla/Stevie Toddler, Wardrobe Theatre
A bare stage, two bass guitars, two pedal boards and three vocal mics. This minimal set-up would prove to be the makings of a surprisingly wide-ranging musical evening thanks to an abundance of renegade creativity.
Stevie Toddler (pic: Tony Benjamin)
First up: Stevie Toddler – returning (despite having vowed never to do so) to solo performance, albeit for this one night only, with stripped down arrangements for voice and bass guitar of self-penned songs from her eponymous band’s impending debut album. She cast a composed figure, opening with Queen Bee’s sinuous bass chords and heavily loaded metaphors offering royal jelly and the like, a dirty blues song somehow laundered by her crystal clear vocals. By contrast the explicit I’m a Spoonful closed the set with innocuous charm. In between, her elliptical poetry and the deconstructed melodies that framed it subverted conventional forms to produce strong songs that spoke of an equally strong-minded artist. One highlight came in Such Big Ideas, an almost-cabaret ballad disguised by deconstruction and a fine showcase for her vocal range and use of electronics. It will be fascinating to hear the album when it finally emerges.
Skylla’s Ruth Goller (pic: Tony Benjamin)
And then there was Skylla, three shamanic figures in black, bedecked in beads and feathers, sporting elaborate paper constructions of animal skulls that half masked their faces. This project from bass player Ruth Goller is a revelation to anyone familiar with her driving playing in Melt Yourself Down, Let Spin, Vula Viel and others. Throughout the set she largely played melodic lines using harmonics off the strings, retuning between numbers to achieve different harmonic effects, while the songs combined unfolding lyrics with non-verbal vocalisations. Skylla’s album largely features Ruth’s own voice but for this live set collaborators Lauren Kinsella and Alice Grant took a larger role, their contrasting styles and skills providing a richly theatrical vocal world for numbers with lengthy titles like Often they Came To Visit, Even Just To See How She Was.
Skylla: Lauren Kinsella, Ruth Goller, Alice Grant. (pic: Tony Benjamin)
This was a remarkable performance of truly original music that drew us into an unprecedented sonic world where the scurrying bass harmonics interwove with closely harmonised streams of words and vocal sounds, sometimes tightly co-ordinated, sometimes flying apart. Often Alice Grant would be lightly enunciating while Lauren Kinsella would be leaping between vocalised improvisations, a soundtrack to an imaginary animation of abstract shapes and colours. There were moments where the three voices united – one song was a reverential a cappella throughout – but more often there was carefully constructed complexity.
Skylla – Alice Grant (pic: Tony Benjamin)
Perhaps it was Kinsella’s Irishness, perhaps it was the line ‘I don’t feel I can carry on’ echoing the playwright’s famous “I can’t go on’, but for me there was a strong evocation of Samuel Beckett’s bleak world here. Then again, the work’s celebration of vocal articulation also recalled Laurie Anderson. Comparisons barely help, however, to catch the uniqueness of what Ruth Goller has created in Skylla. Thanks to her shrewd choice of co-conspirators and her own unflinching artistic vision this was an enthralling (if not always comfortable) musical experience.
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