Before 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 preferred it a lot, as an alternative preferring a rise up in opposition to the generally tedious constraints of classical music, opting to substitute Beethoven with Radiohead. Her dad had performed in bands and studied music in faculty, earlier than altering his main to finance, so there was musical encouragement at home. But although Ballentine was getting stoked on the ever-growing, modern quadrants of lush, experimental acoustic music, she was by no means a scholar of an academic surroundings that welcomed songwriting as a lifeblood.
“I went to a school that was not focused on the arts, so it was very much in my head as something I would just do as a fun thing on the side of a ‘real job,’” Ballentine says. To get to the place she is now, she first needed to transfer to Los Angeles from Hudson Valley suburbia, decide up an artwork diploma from the University of Southern California and work odd jobs within the business, notably as a gallery assistant. Though her pursuits in graphic design or artwork criticism won’t initially beckon a profession as a touring musician, her ardour for drawing in faculty, she says, usually 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 identify she performs beneath. The EP was an necessary introduction to Ballentine as a musician, because it showcased her skills in composition. The identify “Skullcrusher” would possibly counsel one thing a bit extra thrashing, however most of Ballentine’s work is rife with gentle, acoustic balladry, music that stands as a singular ingredient in a dynamic panorama populated by residing parts. Like a full sketchbook, her songs are filled 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 folks plucking. There’s one thing paeanian about how her tunes masquerade like dwell numbers, as if the banjo that shimmers via within the breakdown of “Trace” is being performed one room over by a stranger. “I think a lot about making things in a conceptual way, and think about a body of work and about a collection of songs and what the statement is behind it,” Ballentine says. “There’s an organic quality that I try to preserve in the songs I’m doing now.” She calls the EP “spontaneous” as a result of the songs have been the primary ones she’d ever completed, recorded and launched, however together with her background in visible artwork, she was decided to compose a physique of labor with extra intention behind it.
On the quilt of Ballentine’s full-length debut, Quiet the Room, a symmetrical, brown, colonial-style home is enveloped by an unlimited 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 home will not be the one Ballentine grew up in Mount Vernon, nevertheless it symbolizes part of herself she was actively tapping into when making the report. She calls it a “haunted house” that colours reminiscences of her and her household’s experiences. “Because [the house] is no longer a part of my life, it gets saturated in memory and, through that, gets warped into this fantasy space that I remember through the eyes of my childhood self,” she says. “It’s also this nightmare of having a lot of memories of dealing with anxiety and insomnia as a young child and not really knowing what those things are.”
Writing about her childhood wasn’t all the time the plan for Ballentine. When she started focusing on 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. Instead, she lets the present experiences from the current inform her understanding of ones from the previous. No tune is stationary however, as an alternative, all the time shifting, all the time contemplating, reckoning and reflecting. Like a novel or memoir with deep, connective tissue, Quiet the Room fulfills an entire arc.
In songs like “Whatever Fits Together” and “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine tells us tales of leaving the one home she’s ever identified for someplace new, or craving for a utopian model of her previous, however on ambient tracks “Whistle of the Dead” and “Outside, Playing,” 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 be able to so captivatingly tumble via her personal historical past whereas leaving sufficient house there for us to mission the identical form of curiosity into our personal. “I think it helps make you experience this process of remembering something or forgetting something, looking backwards and reflecting. The production 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 instant texts she pulls from, however there’s a selected affinity for Gillian Welch’s 2001, 14-minute odyssey, “I Dream a Highway,” 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 observe, she turns six traces right into a three-minute journey with out shedding the viscerality, affection and lightweight that breaks via in her personal vocal efficiency.
Choral singing can also be a serious a part of Quiet the Room’s sonic blueprint. While writing the report, Ballentine listened to lots of youngsters’s choirs, in addition to English conductor Benjamin Britten, whose settings from Friday Afternoons, which have been composed for the pupils at Clive House School in Wales, knowledgeable her strategy to vocal development. On “Building a Swing,” she takes completely 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 back and forth between different vocal textures and tones, having this childlike, layered sound, having a clear, strong sound and then having a distorted sound and utilizing all of those different influences to consider the range of possibilities,” 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 home arises in all places, taking form as a monument to Ballentine’s previous, which her internal compass usually factors to. “‘What was it about my childhood that was as dark as it was very comforting and this idealistic kind of place?’ is the question that motivated a lot of the writing,” she says. I don’t know if I’ve a whole reply to it but, nevertheless it’s a spot that holds a lot for me.”
Nick Drake as soon as sang, “I can take a road that’ll see me through,” and on Quiet the Room, Ballentine cuts via grief and loneliness with the same hopeful heat and affection. Her street is a confessionalism that coalesces each a well-known folks 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 together 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.
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