Rose Keeler-Schaffeler spent years working under the name Keel Her, writing songs instrumentally first, adding vocals later. On her new album, under her own name, Universal Language, she reverses that order entirely. Made during pregnancy and her son’s first year, the record trusts her voice alone to hold its center (plus a few low-end harmonies from Daniel O’Sullivan, and forward-pushing rhythms for good measure). Keeler-Schaffeler used the small sounds a baby makes before having any words at all as a jumping-off point: the small gasps, hums, and cries that come before speech. Those ideas get stretched and morphed into pieces that are almost liturgical while still finding ways to dissolve into pure atmosphere.
Universal Language will be released on July 24 by Magic Hollow.
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What are your earliest memories of sound and music? Were there particular moments or recordings that first made you aware of listening as something active, something you were doing rather than just hearing?
One vivid memory is of my fifth birthday party, when my parents hired a musician called Pedro the Percussionist. He arrived with all sorts of unusual instruments and rhythms. That was probably one of the first moments I became conscious of listening as an active experience and wanting to do it myself.
Apparently, as a baby I would sing along to the radio, and my favourite toy was our piano, which I used to pick out little tunes on. I remember enjoying the way singing made me feel, and I loved my Dad singing Swiss lullabies and Beatles tunes to me at bedtime.
Were there certain experiences when you were younger that made you want to start writing and creating your own sounds instead of just listening?
The shift from listening to making music happened when I was about twelve. Around that time, my mother left, and I was quite depressed and threw myself into music.
I bought a ukulele and started teaching myself to play, and I wrote an album of tunes. I transitioned to guitar and started using the name Keel Her. So music was helping me process a difficult period in my life, but I was also genuinely excited by the creative possibilities of it.
Your work as Keel Her has been rooted in DIY bedroom pop and production. How did you first develop your relationship with your own voice as an instrument, separate from songwriting?
I don’t think I had a particularly conscious relationship with my voice for a long time. I fell into making music and became part of a scene that was supportive of the kind of DIY, lo-fi music I was making, and I just followed my instincts. I sang, spoke, (sometimes) shouted, stacked harmonies, buried vocals in the mix or used them as texture, but I wasn’t necessarily thinking about the voice as an instrument in its own right.
A lot of the Keel Her records were written instrumentally first. I’d build tracks and then add vocals afterwards, karaoke-style. The voice was another layer to work with rather than the starting point. I enjoyed manipulating it within recordings, but I wasn’t exploring the full possibilities of it in a deliberate way.
A shift happened around 2018, when I met my (now) partner. We didn’t get together until a few years later, but he introduced me to an incredible range of music and vocal traditions from around the world that I hadn’t really encountered before. One artist that had a particularly strong impact on me was Magma. There was something so liberated about the way they use voice – playful, physical, emotional, unconcerned with conventional ideas of singing or language. In fact, they have their own language! It felt completely free, and I found myself wanting to access that kind of freedom in my own work.
Universal Language feels like a significant departure from your previous work, at least on the surface. How did pregnancy and early motherhood open up this particular territory? Was it something you moved toward consciously, or did it just start happening?
During pregnancy and then early motherhood, I found that a lot of my usual ways of working became less accessible. On a practical level, I stopped reaching for the guitar quite so much, partly because it became physically uncomfortable, and partly because my relationship to it just shifted. Emotionally, I also went through a period where I felt quite withdrawn from music-making in general. I had also been sitting on a Keel Her record for a long time that was still half-formed, and I couldn’t quite find a way into finishing it.
At the same time, I had a difficult experience where someone essentially told me that my future as a musician would be put on hold indefinitely once I became a mother. Whether or not that was “true” didn’t really matter – it had an effect on me. Then I found that I didn’t want to stop making music, I just didn’t want to approach it in the same way. Instead of building songs in the way I normally would, I started working directly with my voice.
I really love how the album is focused on this sort of pre-linguistic vocalization: coos, cries, sighs, etc. Sounds that exist before words… When did you start hearing those sounds as compositional material rather than just the sounds of early life with a newborn?
I heard them as sounds quite early on. At first, though, I was just living with it. Being around a newborn is very immediate – you respond rather than reflect. But over time, especially while I was spending long periods at home and away from my usual ways of making music, I started to notice that I was responding to those sounds in a similar way to how I respond to music. Not because I was trying to “turn them into music,” but because they already behaved like sound with shape and expression.
Your son’s earliest attempts at communication became a direct source for melodic contours and vocal gestures on the record. Can you talk about a specific moment where something he did found its way into the music?
My son, Percy, made this very distinct vocal shape, and it immediately struck me as musically interesting. I remember singing it back to him straight away. I may even have quickly recorded it at the time, because it felt so immediate and singular.
When I later returned to the track, that fragment became the basis for a hocket (around that time I had joined a mother-and-baby singing group, where we learned traditional songs from around the world including a lot of beautiful hocketing techniques).
So basically every voice on the album (except for a handful of bass parts, I believe) is your own. Across 12 tracks, building all that architecture from your own voice – that is incredible, and seems like A LOT. What was that process like physically and psychologically? Did it feel expansive or claustrophobic, or something else entirely?
I was singing so much at the time, and it actually felt incredibly liberating to make music from only my voice. For a long time, I think I had this feeling that my voice wasn’t enough on its own – that I needed words, instruments, arrangement, other elements to really make a piece of music feel complete. But working in this way completely changed that for me. I started to realise that the voice contains far more than I had considered.
With the various bits of tape manipulation, the subtle electronics, these sort of muted drum machines, etc.: the production has a very specific tactile quality. How did those elements find their way in alongside the voice? Was the voice always the anchor, or did the relationship between voice and electronics shift during recording?
Most of the time I would just start by singing quite instinctively, very directly and from the heart, and then build from there by adding harmonies and additional vocal layers. On a few tracks there was a more complex setup involving pedals, synths and tape machines.
The title Universal Language carries a lot of weight. It’s a bold claim. What does universality mean to you in the context of this work?
For me, universality isn’t really a claim about the music being understood in a literal way. It’s more about reaching a place where sound exists before language and before meaning gets fixed in words or interpretation.
Making a record during the first year of a child’s life is its own kind of logistical and emotional feat. What did the actual day-to-day of recording look like during that period?
I would work in small pockets of time whenever it was possible, often quite spontaneously, around Percy’s rhythm. Because the voice was the main instrument, I didn’t need to set up a lot of equipment. I could just begin. I got used to working quickly, intuitively, and trusting first takes and first ideas.
What surprised you most about making Universal Language?
I’ve realised how much I love singing, especially with children, and how powerful and grounding that feels.
And as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Rain, birds (specifically woodpeckers and nightjars), the sound of collective singing, and I’ve also grown partial to very noisy, mechanical toys thanks to my son.
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