In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, three men approach a room that grants the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. They can plainly see the building containing the room; they cannot get near it by walking in a straight line. The way to the room is lined with gravity traps and invisible dangers. They must navigate a zone infected by the residue of some unexplained alien event. As they get closer, climbing through strange, dilapidated buildings, they begin to doubt their own wishes. The people they were at the beginning of the journey start to dissolve. Each of them becomes somebody else the closer he gets to what he wants.
And Your Song is Like a Circle, the second album from New York-based artist Skullcrusher, a.k.a. Helen Ballentine, winds its way into a similar unstable core. Recorded piecemeal over a period of years following the release of her celebrated 2022 debut, Quiet the Room, And Your Song is Like a Circle does not capture experience – it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable. Swaying between vaporous folk and crystalline electronics, landing somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as what’s been lost.
Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she’d called home for nearly a decade. Originally, she flew to the East Coast with a few belongings and her cat Finn to play a string of concerts, including an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in the summer of 2022. She ended up staying with her mother in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she was born and raised. Together, they made their way through the films of Hayao Miyazaki, whose work has been a cornerstone for Ballentine throughout her life.
For the first six months of her time in New York, Ballentine took care of her sick cat, who’d contracted a severe illness and needed daily injections to stay alive. Eventually, she moved into her own apartment in Hudson, where she’d spend the next few years living alone. Through this period of intense isolation, Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks. “I tend to collect art that I like and really sink into it. I was almost living through the stories I was taking in,” Ballentine says. She arranged her space to display her most cherished objects: antique figurines, stuffed animals, and gifts from family and friends. “I’ve formed such intense attachments to my belongings since I was a child,” she says. “I wrote a lot of the songs on the album sitting on the floor of my living room, looking up at all my treasures.”
Lyrics came into shape while doing dishes. She painted her kitchen cabinets. The months grew long. One summer, a moth infestation across Hudson kept her from leaving her building. Moths swarmed outside, and crept into her apartment. She shooed them out of her bedroom for the night. When she woke up, they were all dead. She watched a lot of movies to fill the days. “I had a really visceral experience watching David Lynch’s Inland Empire for the first time,” she says. “At the climax, I literally fell out of my chair crying. I zoomed out and saw myself from above.”
“When you’re in a situation that’s really overwhelming, you start to float above yourself. It’s like you’re disappearing,” Ballentine continues. “You go into this state of numbness. Then it becomes really important to ground yourself. But sometimes when you reawaken in your body and start to heal, it’s so heavy – it’s almost too much to bear.”
At first, she wasn’t sure the music she was composing would cohere into an LP. While making the album, Ballentine focused deeply on the evaporative nature of creative work: the way ideas can appear and dissipate, leaving only faint traces behind, the way a voice courses through a fragile point in time, the way meaning can flicker and falter between people trying their best to understand each other. She recorded at home and in friends’ studios, working alongside Aaron Paul O’Brien in Los Angeles and co-producer Isaac Eiger (Lauren Balthrop, Cassandra Jenkins) in New York. If Skullcrusher’s first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domestic space, Circle finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes.
While recording, Ballentine experimented with new ways of capturing her voice, such as singing with contact microphones attached to her throat, “creating these really scary sounds.” Throughout the record, the line between human and machine blurs. On “Maelstrom,” voices crash between echoing drumbeats like water through a cavern. The vocal filigrees on “Exhale” fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. “Dragon” lets piano echo over tight, gritted percussion. “My songs are memories of you fading,” Ballentine sings over loosely strummed acoustic guitar and sidelong synths on “Periphery.” “Will I ever see you this way again?”
Ballentine fleshed out the album’s songs by layering improvised, wordless vocal takes, cushioning her lyrics in swells of organic sound. “It’s very cathartic to sing like that, physically, and also it conjured the notion of the present moment,” she adds. “Each take is only going to happen now. I can’t recreate it the same way ever again.”
“The voice is my favorite instrument because everybody has it,” she adds. “It’s related to so many different kinds of sounds: crying, screaming, laughing. And it’s ephemeral. It’s going to eventually die.”
Some experiences never spit back what they devour. They are too dense; they wield too much gravity. The closer you get to the nucleus, the more you deform. “That kind of journey can be metaphorically applied to so many different things. It could be trying to find yourself, figure out who you really are, figure out what you believe in,” says Ballentine. “As you are journeying within the labyrinth, you have to take on a different form in order to bear witness to the energy inside. You have to become this other being in order to experience something new, and then return to yourself, or get stuck.”
“I like thinking about my work as a collection, and every time I add more to it, I’m adding a rock,” Ballentine says. “Eventually it might form a circle. Each time I make something, I’m putting another line around the body of work. It feels like I’ll be trying to trace it for my whole life.”
Imagine a hand steering a pencil around an empty space. The lines left in the graphite’s wake are not quite round, but they scratch at the idea of a perfect circle. This sketch wobbles, nearing the axis and then drifting from it. A circle’s ghost lifts from the scrawl all the same: The shape emerges from the failure to capture it. And Your Song is Like a Circle curves across that evocative failure, vibrating with the fervency of the attempt.
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