Earlier than she turned 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 rise up 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 residence. However 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 faculty that was not centered on the humanities, so it was very a lot in my head as one thing I’d 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, decide 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 may not 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.
Learn extra: See Noah Cyrus’ spellbinding efficiency at Brooklyn Metal on her The Hardest Half tour
Ballentine’s storied historical past with music absolutely 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 below. The EP was an necessary introduction to Ballentine as a musician, because it showcased her abilities 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 component in a dynamic panorama populated by residing components. Like a full sketchbook, her songs are stuffed with affected person strokes of quiet grace.
As Skullcrusher, Ballentine meshes subject 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 stay numbers, as if the banjo that shimmers by within the breakdown of “Hint” is being performed one room over by a stranger. “I feel so much about making issues in a conceptual means, 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 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 house 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 house will not be the one Ballentine grew up in Mount Vernon, however it symbolizes part of herself she was actively tapping into when making the document. 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 area that I keep in mind by the eyes of my childhood self,” she says. “It’s additionally this nightmare of getting loads of recollections of coping with nervousness and insomnia as a younger baby and not likely figuring out what these issues are.”
Writing about her childhood wasn’t at all times 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 an alternative, she lets the present experiences from the current inform her understanding of ones from the previous. No tune is stationary however, as a substitute, at all times transferring, at all times contemplating, reckoning and reflecting. Like a novel or memoir with deep, connective tissue, Quiet the Room fulfills an entire arc.
In songs like “No matter Suits Collectively” and “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine tells us tales of leaving the one residence she’s ever recognized for someplace new, or craving for a utopian model of her previous, however on ambient tracks “Whistle of the Useless” and “Exterior, Enjoying,” 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 occurring in one other room, the clicks and fuzzes, the snippets of digitized piano and outdated 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 by her personal historical past whereas leaving sufficient area there for us to challenge 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 selected affinity for Gillian Welch’s 2001, 14-minute odyssey, “I Dream a Freeway,” from Time (The Revelator), in her work. Ballentine takes Welch’s method to verses, which embrace this hypnotic, virtually kaleidoscopic form of repetition, and interprets it into choral sprawls on Quiet the Room. On the title monitor, she turns six strains 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 be a significant a part of Quiet the Room’s sonic blueprint. Whereas writing the document, Ballentine listened to loads 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 Home College in Wales, knowledgeable her method 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 forwards and backwards between totally different vocal textures and tones, having this childlike, layered sound, having a transparent, robust sound after which having a distorted sound and using all of these totally different influences to contemplate the vary of potentialities,” Ballentine provides.
Quiet the Room consists very like 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 thought of residence arises all over the place, taking form as a monument to Ballentine’s previous, which her inside 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 loads of the writing,” she says. I don’t know if I’ve a whole reply to it but, however it’s a spot that holds a lot for me.”
Nick Drake as soon as sang, “I can take a street that’ll see me by,” and on Quiet the Room, Ballentine cuts by 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 area and finds electrical energy within the prosaics of her personal environment. A wincing floorboard might 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 area. 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.
