Videos: Skullcrusher, ‘They Quiet the Room’ and ‘Quiet the Room’

Kevin Bronson on August 18th, 2022

0

Skullcrusher (Photo by Angela Ricciardi)

For Helen Ballantine, who doesn’t so much as bang heads as Skullcrusher but soothes them, quietude has long been characteristic of her ambient folk music. There’s always just enough there there to transmit a spectrum of emotions.

This week, Skullcrusher released the title track to her debut album, “Quiet the Room,” out Oct. 14. And actually, it’s the title track, times two. “They Quiet the Room,” the first song on the album, and “Quiet the Room,” the penultimate track, are the same song, realized in two different ways. Each blooms in slow-motion wonder, as if a cherub achieving full self-awareness in just over three minutes.

“‘Quiet the Room’ is the first song I wrote for the album although I didn’t know it yet,” Ballantine says. “It felt like opening a secret door into a new world. I wrote it on the piano I grew up with and inevitably felt the presence of my childhood self. … Simply put, the song is about communication and isolation, the kind experienced by a child that influences their journey into adulthood. I was thinking about my childhood bedroom but also an unknown room, surreal and empty but for the weighted presence of things unsaid. The basis of the recording is a live performance I did at Dreamland studios in Woodstock, N.Y. From that take we added field recordings and room ambience (crickets, creaking, doors opening and closing, footsteps, etc. It wasn’t until a year later that I revisited the song as the beginning of this album.

“I had a thought to write an alternate version of the song with different chords on guitar. This version, ‘They Quiet the Room,’ became a different song entirely. It shifted the tone of the lyrics, and instead of a dark room I imagined playing outside in the daytime, lost in some fantasy world. The two together, ‘They Quiet the Room’ into ‘Quiet the Room,’ are like the passing of a day. Perhaps one spent as a child making up imaginary games outside before returning inside for dinner, crossing over some kind of barrier as dusk settles, to have dinner or sit at the piano alone.”

As with the video for “Whatever Fits Together,” Ballantine collaborated with Silken Weinberg and Angela Ricciardi. Read more about the concepts behind and the making of the videos here.

||| Watch: The videos for “They Quiet the Room” and “Quiet the Room”