Earlier than she grew to become Skullcrusher, Helen Ballentine toddled round upstate New York, dreaming up songs in her head whereas banging on the piano. By the age of 5, she started taking classes herself, however by no means appreciated it a lot, as a substitute preferring a rebel towards the generally tedious constraints of classical music, opting to substitute Beethoven with Radiohead. Her dad had performed in bands and studied music in school, earlier than altering his main to finance, so there was musical encouragement at house. However although Ballentine was getting stoked on the ever-growing, modern quadrants of lush, experimental acoustic music, she was by no means a pupil of an academic setting that welcomed songwriting as a lifeblood.
“I went to a college that was not centered on the humanities, so it was very a lot in my head as one thing I might simply do as a enjoyable factor on the aspect of a ‘actual job,’” Ballentine says. To get to the place she is now, she first needed to transfer to Los Angeles from Hudson Valley suburbia, choose up an artwork diploma from the College of Southern California and work odd jobs within the business, notably as a gallery assistant. Although her pursuits in graphic design or artwork criticism won’t initially beckon a profession as a touring musician, her ardour for drawing in school, she says, typically mirrored what she was writing songs about in her free time.
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Ballentine’s storied historical past with music totally got here to the forefront of her life after her tenure at USC, when she compiled 4 songs onto an EP titled Skullcrusher — the stage title she performs beneath. The EP was an necessary introduction to Ballentine as a musician, because it showcased her abilities in composition. The title “Skullcrusher” would possibly counsel one thing a bit extra thrashing, however most of Ballentine’s work is rife with comfortable, acoustic balladry, music that stands as a singular factor in a dynamic panorama populated by dwelling parts. Like a full sketchbook, her songs are stuffed with affected person strokes of quiet grace.
As Skullcrusher, Ballentine meshes discipline recordings — sirening cicadas, East Coast seashores, homes murmuring with creaking ghosts — with tranquil, honeyed people plucking. There’s one thing paeanian about how her tunes masquerade like dwell numbers, as if the banjo that shimmers by within the breakdown of “Hint” is being performed one room over by a stranger. “I feel lots about making issues in a conceptual approach, and take into consideration a physique of labor and a few assortment of songs and what the assertion is behind it,” Ballentine says. “There’s an natural high quality that I attempt to protect within the songs I’m doing now.” She calls the EP “spontaneous” as a result of the songs had been the primary ones she’d ever completed, recorded and launched, however along with her background in visible artwork, she was decided to compose a physique of labor with extra intention behind it.
On the duvet of Ballentine’s full-length debut, Quiet the Room, a symmetrical, brown, colonial-style house is enveloped by an enormous sea of blue. It’s an eerie nonetheless, harking back to a stoic dollhouse or some form of structure straight out of an Ari Aster film. Two porch lights are on, and shadows linger atop the roof and throughout window panes. The house just isn’t the one Ballentine grew up in Mount Vernon, but it surely symbolizes part of herself she was actively tapping into when making the file. She calls it a “haunted home” that colours recollections of her and her household’s experiences. “As a result of [the house] is not part of my life, it will get saturated in reminiscence and, by that, will get warped into this fantasy house that I bear in mind by the eyes of my childhood self,” she says. “It’s additionally this nightmare of getting plenty of recollections of coping with nervousness and insomnia as a younger youngster and probably not figuring out what these issues are.”
Writing about her childhood wasn’t all the time the plan for Ballentine. When she started specializing in making Quiet the Room, she let her thoughts wander wherever it wanted to, creatively, after which started forming the throughlines for the songs — which aren’t a linear, chronological timeline of her life. As a substitute, she lets the present experiences from the current inform her understanding of ones from the previous. No tune is stationary however, as a substitute, all the time shifting, all the time contemplating, reckoning and reflecting. Like a novel or memoir with deep, connective tissue, Quiet the Room fulfills a complete arc.
In songs like “No matter Matches Collectively” and “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine tells us tales of leaving the one house she’s ever recognized for someplace new, or craving for a utopian model of her previous, however on ambient tracks “Whistle of the Lifeless” and “Exterior, Taking part in,” she asks us to step into these tales and really feel them. Like a wind smelling of a well-known morning, or an argument between family members taking place in one other room, the clicks and fuzzes, the snippets of digitized piano and previous radio distortion, transport listeners to moments that exist in their very own idyllic vacuum. It’s a testomony to Ballentine’s world-building, how she will so captivatingly tumble by her personal historical past whereas leaving sufficient house there for us to venture the identical form of curiosity into our personal. “I feel it helps make you expertise this means of remembering one thing or forgetting one thing, trying backwards and reflecting. The manufacturing helps put you in that headspace,” Ballentine provides.
The Rolodex of musical pursuits that Ballentine siphons inspiration from is huge. She cites the catalogs of Nick Drake and Sufjan Stevens as speedy texts she pulls from, however there’s a specific affinity for Gillian Welch’s 2001, 14-minute odyssey, “I Dream a Freeway,” from Time (The Revelator), in her work. Ballentine takes Welch’s strategy to verses, which embody this hypnotic, nearly kaleidoscopic form of repetition, and interprets it into choral sprawls on Quiet the Room. On the title monitor, she turns six traces right into a three-minute journey with out dropping the viscerality, affection and light-weight that breaks by in her personal vocal efficiency.
Choral singing can also be a serious a part of Quiet the Room’s sonic blueprint. Whereas writing the file, Ballentine listened to plenty of youngsters’s choirs, in addition to English conductor Benjamin Britten, whose settings from Friday Afternoons, which had been composed for the pupils at Clive Home College in Wales, knowledgeable her strategy to vocal development. On “Constructing a Swing,” she takes totally different octave performances and deliberately mimics a youngsters’s choir, as if there’s a group of individuals singing behind her, till it’s simply her voice alone. “I’m going backwards and forwards between totally different vocal textures and tones, having this childlike, layered sound, having a transparent, sturdy sound after which having a distorted sound and using all of these totally different influences to contemplate the vary of prospects,” Ballentine provides.
Quiet the Room consists very similar to an avant-garde movie or an immersive play. There are videotape interludes and temporary instrumentals shouldering the intimate, gossamer songs additional throughout the album. The concept of house arises in all places, taking form as a monument to Ballentine’s previous, which her interior compass typically factors to. “‘What was it about my childhood that was as darkish because it was very comforting and this idealistic form of place?’ is the query that motivated plenty of the writing,” she says. I don’t know if I’ve an entire reply to it but, but it surely’s a spot that holds a lot for me.”
Nick Drake as soon as sang, “I can take a highway that’ll see me by,” and on Quiet the Room, Ballentine cuts by grief and loneliness with an identical hopeful heat and affection. Her highway is a confessionalism that coalesces each a well-known people archetype and a devastating reimagining of existential solemness and self-reflection. Ballentine’s songwriting leaves the confines of studio house and finds electrical energy within the prosaics of her personal environment. A wincing floorboard could be as melodic as a refrain, whereas the bullfrogs laughing by the close by pond present an inimitable form of percussion.
As Skullcrusher, Ballentine’s work is a balm that widens the potential of a sonic liminal house. She isn’t simply giving us the exposition of her personal future; she’s letting us step into it along with her. It’s a priceless form of intimacy that solely arrives when the mud of chord progressions and tape loops settles, and all that’s left is you and one other particular person — two our bodies miscible with a kinetic heat that has lengthy felt acquainted however nonetheless gleams with an indescribable but hopeful promise.
