SPECIAL GUESTS:

TBD

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 an everchanging, 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. She ended up returning upstate to New York’s Hudson Valley, where she was born and
raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films,
books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative
aftershocks.
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.
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. These are songs that vibrate with the fervency of an attempt to capture a
moment, to draw a circle around it. "I like thinking about my work as a collection," 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."