Eszter Balint on Jim Jarmusch, David Bowie, and Life With an Experimental Theatre Troupe

Eszter Balint doesn’t see her story as anything special. The Singer, songwriter, violinist, and actress starred in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise at the age of 16. She bolted from communist Hungary at the age of 10, with her extended family of parents and their avant-garde theatre troupe.  She has acted with David Bowie, worked alongside Mia Farrow and John Malkovich, and then of course there is the music.

An accomplished violinist, Balint released her third album, Airless Midnight, last year, featuring guitarists such as Marc Ribot and Dave Schramm (Yo La Tengo). Production was handed over to the fine talents of JD Foster (Richmond Fontaine, Calexico and more). On the album she also plays guitar, violin, melodica, and mandolin, but it is her violin that she is recognised for, and it was a key element in being asked to play a character over six episodes of FX sitcom, Louie in 2014.

All this isn’t really that far a cry from Balint’s beginnings. Her father, a poet, was devoted to their theatre collective in Hungary. Her grandfather was a prolific visual artist and very well known in Budapest. “I basically lived and breathed the arts from Day 1” she told me from New York via Skype.

When she was six years old Balint took up the violin. She thinks it was her mum who suggested this as the instrument of choice. “Mom’s story is that there’s a fantastic Hungarian composer who is kind of a big deal now internationally, and he was a friend of the family. He looked at my hands as a little kid and said he thought I had violin playing hands so that’s what I should study.”

And study she did, first with an “excellent teacher”, and then attending a conservatory – “so as a kid I was taught some good foundational skills.”  Meanwhile, her extended family’s theatre collective were performing progressive, experimental plays that were censored by the 1970s Hungarian leadership. “I remember a lot of meetings at our apartment talking about the plays” she recalled. “I remember when they were told to stop having anything to do with performances … the whole collective left together and moved to Paris for a year with the eventual goal to settle in New York.”

As a ten year old she was protected from the trauma of this whole period. “To tell you the truth it was pretty exciting for me. I was young, I had no idea how scary it was to go somewhere with no money, no language, I was totally oblivious.”

Once in New York the collective, known as Squat Theatre, settled into a 3-story building on West 23rd Street which had previously been a shop. It became their theatre space and music venue for the following eight years, where they continued with their experimental performances.

Balint was fully involved, and was acting in these plays from an early age. “The entire premise was taking artistic risks. We were blurring the lines between performers, audience, and theatre as a safe haven of entertainment, versus something that feels dangerously close to life.” For example “one of the main premises of the mid-period plays was that they were constructed in the storefront window so that it was the stage, and the backdrop was a real live street.”

And so, as Balint grew from child to teenager, she continued to eat, sleep and drink theatre and music with her supportive, artistic extended family (6 adults and 4 children to begin with). At school however, and with her peers, there was an ongoing sense of outsider. “New York was such a melting pot that I feel that who I am is as much, if not more, informed by that of the New York sensibility of that time. Not so much my school but the people that I gravitated towards outside my peer group. They were a little bit older than me. They were all outsiders. Artists and outsiders. So that has informed my coming of age and identity rather than specifically being Hungarian.”

By the time she was 13 years old, Balint was a regular DJ in the theatre space. And there was live music too – Squat didn’t just produce progressive art; it also invited artists to share the space. As a venue it was a stamping ground for bands like DNA and Defunkt. Music of the time like No Wave, funk, and cutting edge jazz had a home.  Musical pioneers like Sun Ra were regulars. “Sun Ra was a house band and would come in on the bus, all 50 of them, and unload their gear and do concerts.”

“There were quite a few noisy great bands. The Lounge Lizards had their first concert at squat I’m pretty sure. Kid Creole and the Coconuts did their first concert at squat. They also had a lot of blues and jazz going on, and Nico lived there for a while and played there a lot.

By the time she was 15 or so, Balint was put in charge of the soundtracks for the plays. “People in the theatre had a lot of strong ideas about the soundtracks before I got involved so I had my aesthetic shaped a little by that. One scene would have Wagner then another would have Kraftwerk, so it was open and eclectic … a lot of Wagner though. Wagner is very theatrical.”

Then at 16, Balint was asked to play Eva, the Hungarian cousin, in Jim Jarmusch’s iconic Stranger Than Paradise. This somewhat upped the ante. To the average viewer, acting in such an important film looks like a massive step, but to Balint it wasn’t a really big jump.  At the time Jarmusch was a regular at Squat Theatre, he was somebody she hung out with. “Stranger Than Paradise started out as a little film, and I’d been in plays, so it was actually a completely organic jump … None of us predicted it would be the hit that it turned out to be. So it’s not like we went into to it knowing it was going to be considered a historically iconic, almost genre defining film”.

Her acting experience went on to help Balint hone her skills as a singer and songwriter as well. It’s an interesting point, and it reminded me of an interview I had last year with singer David Corley, in which he had explained the difference between performing someone’s work onstage, and actually performing your own songs. “Stepping up with your own songs in front of people … that was part of my hold up” he told me. “I never had stage fright but I was definitely afraid of exposing myself.”

I wondered if theatre had helped Balint prepare for that fear of exposure. When I asked, she knew exactly where Corley was coming from. “Getting up and singing your own songs, there’s nothing like it, that’s the rawest. It took me a long time to get used to that. There’s something about it that’s so much more than performing a role. But now I’m OK. It’s still a challenge but one on a whole different level.”

So what happens if she is singing a song, pouring out her soul, and the audience talks through it? “Oh yeah that, that’s the school of hard knocks” she sighed. “Yes that’s happened and it’s a little painful when you’re doing something that’s close to the bone or really requires listening. I’ve been there, we’ve all been there. What I’ve done in the past is find the one thing, the two people, the one person, even if it’s myself or my guitar – just connect with that. You can’t not connect – that doesn’t work, so you just find the one person.”

“When I perform it’s usually where I live, and usually at venues where people have come out to hear me, so I’ve not had too much of that nasty chatter lately.” I mentioned Kimmie Rhodes, and how she doesn’t have that problem because she picks her venues, and plays theatres where people are going to be seated and are going to see her. “That’s smart” Balint responded. “I don’t think I’m in that position. There the quandary of how to cultivate an audience in a new city, but yeah, that’s smart.”

Over the years Balint has released three albums – Flicker in ’98 and Mud released in 2004, after which she took off the time she needed to concentrate on raising her son. Once he was at school though, she recaptured that notion to write, and finally, eventually, that writing led to her third album Airless Midnight being released last year.

Airless Midnight is a sophisticated 10-song collection with a dark thread running through the red velvet. On this album it is not yet dawn, so don’t relax. There are discordant harmonies to stop you fully leaning back in your chair, violin that unsettles the landscape, stories that leave you to finish the picture, or ruminate on that version of events. You can hear echoes of the music she was listening to in the theatre space all those years ago. Like the angry howls and punk inclined violin on “All You Need”. Jazz creeps in, rock stands out. The experimental is never far away.

There are also random sounds and whistling. Take “Silence (After the Phonecall)” for example. With a breathy, innocent voice Balint asks “Take me back to never/I want to stay forever”. She told me she didn’t whistle very well on the album, and that’s interesting because to me it sounds deliberate. Like she doesn’t quite have it to be happy and strong. More like she’s lost in the woods and whistling a brave song. “Whistling was a little bit of a conceptual thing in that particular song. I made that song with a real sweetness to it, piano, countryish, ragtime, a sweet lullaby. I wanted that contrast. I did it because the words are heavy and I didn’t want anything else to weigh them down.”

“It seems a lot of the interesting human stories exist in dark places” she went on to explain when I asked about the darkness in the album. It’s important not to weigh it down with incredibly dense heavy music all the time. That’s why I work at creating a little air and space and contrast. If you leave room by having contrast it is more digestible. It means that there isn’t this thing coming at you, so there’s room for your own interpretation. That’s important to me. It’s not that I have an agenda about needing to be dark. It’s just the way it turns out.”

This is the third album that JD Foster has produced for her. “He gets hands on about the mix, we work well together. I also feel like we’ve both evolved over the years. I’m not the same Eszter Balint who made my first record in a lot of ways. It becomes easier when you’ve worked with someone once or twice, it becomes shorthand.”

However, Foster is just one of an impressive array of collaborators on Airless Midnight. There is also Dave Schramm (“an incredible guitarist”), Marc Ribot with whom she has worked previously, including guest membership of his band Ceramic Dog, and Chris Cochrane (John Zorn, Zena Parkins) with whom Balint has worked so much they are “practically like quibbling siblings onstage, which is extra value you get for the price of admission.”

It took more than a decade for Balint to gift us with this latest album. “The key reason for that is that I had a kid” she explained, but there was more to it. “It always takes me a long while to feel like I’m ready and I’m never ready anyway. There were also other things going on as well including huge changes in the music and recording industry which made it harder to find funding and make the music.”

Another reason for the delay was being offered the part of Louie C.K.’s girlfriend Amia, in the FX sitcom, Louie. She was working on songs for the album when she was approached about the role, and the album was put on hold. However, she nearly tried to talk him out of hiring her at the beginning. “That’s how scared I was of acting again after so long. I think I was also a little nervous to play the Hungarian girl again as I’d done that before and I became so identified by that part for so long. So I had some hesitation. But the script was too good, and he’s just too smart, and I’m the person who ends up doing the things that scares them the most.”

“I think he recognised me from The Movie (Stranger Than Paradise). He came to see a gig of mine and came up to me afterwards. He said he’s been writing a part with me in mind, and the rest is history. He also really appreciated my music and asked me to contribute to the soundtrack of all those episodes that I was in.”

To help with any stage fright, she was able to draw on her music performance experience. “When I’m performing my songs it’s a story. I’m connecting with a character in the song. I was able to think OK, it hasn’t been too long since I’ve done this on stage while preforming my songs. It didn’t feel like an alien thing at all, plus he’s really good with actors, leaves you alone for the most part so you can start to trust your own intuition. It was really good.”

There is one other acting experience that stands out to Eszter Balint. It’s not a film that she is overly proud of her own performance, but she will never forget it as she worked alongside David Bowie in the movie. “I’m incredibly proud of it” she told me, “and now that he’s passed it means even more to me than it ever did that I got the chance. He was a great guy. We spent quite a bit of time hanging in the few weeks that we were together. I loved him and I’m happy to have known him.”

“He was gentle, down to earth, super interesting, smart and funny. All those things. It really shook me up when he died, and now that he has, I feel this urge to express how amazingly lucky I was to have met him.”