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Friendly Hello and Introduction!
Hello hello hello everyone!! Welcome to the beautiful month of March! Many wonderful things are happening this month, like the first day of spring on the 21st, my friend Abby's birthday on the 24th, Daylight saving time, my 20th birthday on the 12th, and most importantly, International Women's Day on March 8th! (today!)
I am an outspoken radical feminist (trans inclusionary, of course), and I am so lucky to be surrounded by so many wonderful women in my life. To my beautiful aunt Missy, I love you so much. Your work in healthcare is so inspiring to me, and I adore you. To my cousin Maggie, I love you, and your work as an educator is so beautiful. To the gorgeous women in my life: Lily, Jenny, Jasmine, Abby, June, Skye, Phoebe, Lulu, Starlet, the women in UIC Radio, and many, many more, I adore you all so much.
Women truly make the world go round and have shaped medicine, education, science, culture, art, and music. So what better artist to dive into than Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter herself, an outspoken feminist musician whose work I am head over heels in love with
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Who Is Kristin Hayter?
Kristin Hayter, born in 1986 in San Diego, CA, is a multi-genre artist with an overarching theme of feminism, abuse, violence, religion, death, and survival. She is famously known by her stage name, Lingua Ignota, but with her recent project, she shifted to the name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.
Hayter's past projects under her Lingua Ignota alias touched on themes of the violence men perpetrate toward women, sexism, victimhood, anger, survival, and religion. Hayter creates anthems for the survivors of horrific men, and she manages to sonically recreate the feelings of despair, oppression, loneliness, and suffering that one feels in abusive relationships while simultaneously emulating the pure evil and hatred that abusive men spew out.
One of the things I find very interesting about Hayter is her poeticness and dedication to her craft. When getting her Masters in Fine Arts, she created "BURN EVERYTHING TRUST NO ONE KILL YOURSELF," which includes 13 songs inspired by 10,000 pages she had compiled herself that are filled with misogynistic lyrics, internet archives, police filings, and court records, all tied to her experience of abuse and misogyny as a woman. "I put that into an algorithm, using Markov chain in orders three and four, and I created my own voice with it. Sometimes I would edit it, sometimes not. It is ultimately not any of my own language really. I was taking that language—which is so loaded, but also so meaningless, just a conceit of the genre—and I was trying to give it meaning again, but obviously in a different way." Said Hayter.
According to Hayter herself, "I decided on 10,000 pages because that’s my body weight in standard paper, and it’s an impossible book object---I wanted to create something vast, unreadable, and terrifying."
Growing up, she had experience singing within the church and also being part of her local hardcore and metal scene, although she had distanced herself because of the rampant misogyny. In her later work, she spits in the face of the sexist pornogrind bands that sample serial killers for their work and sampled a famous female serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, who had experienced severe abuse leading to self-defensive murder in her song "DISEASE OF MEN."
The genre I'd say she falls into varies by album. Still, there are aspects of inspiration from black metal and hardcore in her earlier works, neoclassical darkwave, death industrial, power electronics, and liturgical experimental rock, with heavy themes of catholicism and Appalachian horror.
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SAVED!
This album is about the experience of rebirth and salvation and how healing is disgusting, ugly, and like watching a scab grow over and fall off. Sometimes, the scab gets picked at, and sometimes, you pick at your scabs and delay the healing process. However, you will eventually find your new healed self. Hayter has retired from the moniker Lingua Ignota and has said, “It is not healthy for me to relive my worst experiences over and over. I am taking a new direction with my music, and I am looking forward to the future."
When talking about her creative process for this album, I watched so many interviews and read so much, and the way she came at this album artistically was so creative. She had taken warped tapes of hymns and altered her instruments to curate this eerie dissonant experience perfectly. Between disturbingly beautiful songs there are upbeat southern gospel songs that offer you a sense of comfort and protection. She had said that when creating this, she had induced sleep deprivation, fasted, and had done sensory deprivation and sensory overload to induce her speaking in tongues which is primarily heard in the last track of SAVED! "HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING".
The tracks from SAVED! are:
❁ I'M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN
❁ ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL
❁ THERE IS POWER IN THE BLOOD
❁ IDUMEA
❁ I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS
❁ PRECIOUS LORD TAKE MY HAND
❁ MAY THIS COMFORT AND PROTECT YOU
❁ THE POOR WAYFARING STRANGER
❁ NOTHING BUT THE BLOOD OF JESUS
❁ I KNOW HIS BLOOD CAN MAKE ME WHOLE
❁ HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING
My absolute favorite songs are; I WILL BE WITH YOU ALWAYS, IDUMEA, I KNOW HIS BLOOD CAN MAKE ME WHOLE, HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING. I have had some pretty rough experiences with men throughout my life, and my relationship with faith and religion is relatively strained, I consider myself to be agnostic, but I do have a soft spot for religious themes, and this album is sonically so beautiful. The experience she curates in this album is truly like a rollercoaster, you feel the ups and downs, the devotion, the fear, it gave me literal chills. I think all of the Ethel Cain girlies who want to listen to something with the same religious horror tone but more intense to check out her work.
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