Skullcrusher | Indie

In the organizer's words:

And Your Song is Like a Circle, the second album from New York-based artist Skullcrusher aka Helen Ballentine, winds its way into an ever-changing, unstable core. Recorded piecemeal over several years following the release of her acclaimed debut Quiet the Room (2022), And Your Song is Like a Circle doesn't capture an experience - rather, it hints at the imprint of an experience that cannot be captured. Oscillating between floating folk and crystalline electronics, somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle explores how grief turns inward. The loss itself becomes as real and tangible as what has been lost.

Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she had called home for nearly a decade. Eventually, she returned to the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, where she was born and raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, during which Ballentine immersed herself in films, books and art that reflected the rupture of the nationwide move and its dissociative aftermath.

Throughout the album, the line between human and machine blurs. On "Maelstrom", voices collide between echoing drum beats like water in a cave. The vocal filigrees on "Exhale" fan out in a haze of synthesizers and strings. "Dragon" has a piano echoing over tight, tense percussion.

If Skullcrusher's first album drew the detailed intimacies of domestic spaces, Circle is now vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It circles an event horizon in long, slow movements. These are songs that vibrate with the feverish attempt to capture a moment, to draw a circle around it. "I like to think of my work as a collection," says Ballentine. "At some point it might form a circle. Every time I make something, I draw another line around the whole work. It feels like I've been trying to trace it my whole life."

On 07.06.2026 Skullcrusher comes to the Nachtasyl.

Price information:

VVK start: February 6, 2026, 10.00 a.m.