Lingua Ignota - To the bottom of psychosis

Even listeners accustomed to the most extreme and unconventional sounds will find the work of Rhode Island artist Kristin Hayter, and her project Lingua Ignota, a thoroughly demanding listen. A survivor of domestic violence, Hayter finds in the scream her catharsis and her rebirth, crafting a desperate requiem for all women who are victims of men's violence. Her records are gut punches delivered with maximum violence, with no compromise and no intention of offering the listener anything welcoming or consoling. The main themes are anger, despair, comfort, but also revenge, all of which coexist almost schizophrenically throughout her entire discography. On one side, hatred and the desire for vindication (the scream and the most extreme elements of her sound), on the other, the aspiration to inner peace (the bond with religious music). It's hard to imagine an artist capable of delving so deep into her own depression, to the point that every track can be understood as a psychoanalytic session, a striking exorcism that drives evil out of her own body.

If art is also about digging to the bottom of one's own phobias and psychoses, then the Lingua Ignota project truly reaches down to the most intimate and philosophical concept of art. Behind so much violence lies a genuine artist with her own language and, we might say, her own poetics as a cursed singer-songwriter. It's hard to pin her discography to any particular genre; Kristin Hayter's biography is so peculiar and extreme that even her music has no obvious points of reference. If we wanted to find a broad category to place her in, it could be the vast realm of dark music, since her work is deeply marked by blackness, depression and a violent, Freudian death drive. But that alone wouldn't be enough to contain the entire world of the Lingua Ignota project, which also holds doses of black metal (very often in the vocals), industrial, musique concrète, extreme vocals, avant-garde, classical pianism – a legacy of Hayter's youthful studies – and even medieval Latin texts.

It's impossible to truly grasp the substrate from which the American musician's project emerges without a broad look at her biography. Born in 1986 in Del Mar, California, she spent much of her childhood in the suburbs. As often happens to those with an affinity for art, she felt suffocated by small-town life. Her difference, and her fragile, solitary character, made her a target of bullying.

I think of Del Mar as a kind of hell because as a teenager I was so different from everyone else that it would have been impossible to find myself there.

(Kristin Hayter)

She begins studying music in church thanks to a teacher who notices her vocal talent, and from there her classical studies begin, which will deeply shape her career. Around the age of fifteen she discovers extreme music, developing a passion for grindcore, noise and, to some extent, punk. As a teenager she falls madly in love with Kurt Cobain, captivated not only by his music but also by his emotional fragility. She draws on both her musical influences and her classical training, managing to reconcile the two elements in a deeply personal way across every one of her albums. She then moves to Providence, Rhode Island, where she studies at the Art Institute of Brown University. These are years marked by violence suffered at the hands of more than one man (she ends up in the ER more than once due to beatings) and by the resulting anorexia, which brings her to the brink of death.

Despite her troubled existence, she graduates in 2016 with a truly monumental ten-thousand-page thesis titled "Burn Everything Trust No One Kill Yourself," a collection of “texts, message board posts, liner notes from extreme music subgenres that mythologize misogyny, court documents, audio recordings and police records of my experiences of violence.” This immense stream of consciousness becomes the source for her first audiovisual installations, based on Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring.”

I'm trying to build something that speaks of the unspeakable

(Kristin Hayter)

From here, drawing inspiration from the unknown language created by the brilliant medieval woman Hildegard of Bingen, her recording career begins, with the self-produced album Let The Evil Of His Own Lips Cover Him (2017), inspired by Angela Browne's book "When Battered Women Kill," symbolically released on Valentine's Day.

Hayter's ideas are already crystal clear from the very start, and the debut betrays no uncertainty whatsoever. She finds that most depictions of violence against women are misogynistic and male-centric, almost a boast of the man who manages to dominate a woman. Her goal, then, is to flip the entire paradigm on its head and create violent music in which the victim doesn't relive her traumatic experience, but instead finds the strength and energy to defend herself against a future attack.

Let The Evil Of His Own Lips Cover Him combines bel canto, black liturgy, sacred music, spoken word and monstrous harsh-noise dissonance. Voices of women recounting the violence they suffered intertwine with neoclassical passages, harrowing screams, texts from the "Stabat Mater" and anguished industrial soundscapes. "Disease Of Men" opens with organ notes over a backdrop of accounts of violence. The vocal delivery recalls both classical singing and the most searing, anguished moments of Nico. The dominant influences are those of religious classical music, like a great requiem dedicated exclusively to victims and their vengeance.

The dialogues grow increasingly agitated, but the vocals remain exalted, becoming what Kristin Hayter calls a "hymn to survivors". Organ and voice return in "Suffer Forever", an austere, moving and cathartic track (the long journey toward the closing "I Don't Suffer Anymore"). But the masterpiece is "That He May Not Rise Again", fifteen minutes of truly unhinged, boundless poetry, often worthy of the most extreme Diamanda Galas. After a recording of a man's words promising unconditional love, the track erupts into a monstrous harsh-noise explosion that obliterates every lie just uttered. It's as if the lies had been torn open to make room for raw reality. Hayter intones a harrowing "Stabat Mater", a religious hymn to the deepest suffering (that of Mary witnessing her son Jesus crucified). At a certain point there's a genuine explosion of sound that violently assaults the listener, extreme industrial with its first truly cathartic, unmatched screams. The organ drone underneath persists unperturbed, even as it's devastated by increasingly extreme sounds.

The comparison with Galas seems the closest one, but in truth the Lingua Ignota project seems to even surpass the Greek musician, both in violence and in the ability to communicate with — and almost "violate" — the listener. This majestic anti-violence hymn collapses at the end into words halfway between a scream and a sob, "Liberami oh Signore dall'uomo violento!". It's hard to imagine music with ideas so powerful and clear right from a debut. Piano takes center stage in the short, classically sung sonata "The Chosen One", where the chosen one is obviously violence's designated victim. The piano slowly fades into nothing, as does the increasingly faint voice, like a kind of slow agony — that of the victim unable to reclaim her own freedom.

A few months later, Lingua Ignota outdoes herself with All Bitches Die (2017), an even more extreme and violent work, with four long tracks about revenge and rebirth, four new hymns of survivors that at more than one point recall the "Murder Ballads" of Nick Cave. The fifteen minutes of "Woe To All (On The Day Of My Wrath)" represent the album's apotheosis and the new manifesto of her poetics. The two elements of her music (primordial chaos and screaming on one hand, the neoclassical side on the other) coexist and take turns with one another.

⟦Q1⟧

(Lyrics from "Woe To All")

The opening of musique concrète (the sound of sheep bells, perhaps a metaphor for unwitting women being led to slaughter) is followed by a devastating apotheosis of synth and inhuman screams ("woe to all"). Just two notes raise an impassable wall of sound worthy of the most extreme work of Ben Frost; were they guitars, we'd immediately think of the earliest, harshest Swans records. Suddenly the violence dissolves into a neoclassical interlude, where chaos and irrationality give way to stillness and reason. A classical piano accompanies Hayter's voice almost like a secular anti-violence prayer. The schizophrenic element (almost a dual personality locked in constant struggle) is ever-present, as if the artist were able to translate every one of her sensations into her music with precision. It's a colossal opening, a natural evolution of the earlier masterpiece "That He May Not Rise Again". The circle closes as it began, the harrowing bells return and the chaos rises again. Once more, it's hard to grasp how so much violence and, at the same time, so much poetry can coexist.

"All Bitches Die (Bitches All Die Here)", twelve minutes long, begins with simple voice and piano, a new secular prayer invoking revenge ("Sinner, you'd better get ready, hallelujah"). The invocations are gradually interrupted by relentless electronic interference, while the piano keeps hammering the same note unperturbed. Then the voice returns (at one point it feels like a terrifying lysergic trip à la Morrison), the piano becomes almost indebted to Romantic classical music, but the harrowing lyrics stand in stark contrast ("I'll find you, I'll tie your feet to hell, I'll break your legs in two"). Children's singing and a preacher's words open "For I Am The Light (And Mine Is The Only Way Now)", an extreme track that pursues the surreal dichotomy between the religious component (the sound of the organ) and an unquenchable thirst for revenge (the anguished vocals). This time chaos prevails, the vocals are devastated and cannot withstand the tragic finale. "Holy Is The Name (Of My Ruthless Axe)" is a hushed, church-like hymn invoking a catharsis that, schizophrenically, can only come through revenge ("holy is the name of my ruthless axe"), yet delivered in a vocal that seems to call for peace and forgiveness.

In just a few months, with only two albums, Hayter has reached truly astonishing heights.

After so much splendor/horror, she devotes 2018 to completing her music studies in Chicago, with a thesis on Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. In 2019 she releases Caligula, so far her longest album (sixty-six minutes) and the one with the most tracks (eleven). Abrasive and extreme, it nonetheless feels less cohesive than its predecessors. The new concept on human madness and violence borrows Caligula's insanity as a manifesto for violent, domineering men; it's essentially split in two: some tracks closer to a dark-ballad idea à la Nick Cave, others where the extreme limit of madness is pushed past breaking point. A stroke of genius, and perhaps unrepeatable, is the reworking of "Queen Mary's Funeral" by the seventeenth-century composer Henry Purcell, already wonderfully revisited by Wendy Carlos for the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange".

⟦Q2⟧

(Kristin Hayter)

The somber requiem for Queen Mary, a masterpiece of 1600s Baroque music, is torn apart and devastated by a vocal pushed to the very limits of the human, with a truly extreme violence that leaves one stunned. The theme repeats with words growing ever harsher and more anguished ("I'm the fucking death dealer, I'm the butcher of the world") that lead back to the theme of revenge ("May your own shame hang you, may dishonor drown you, may there be no kindness, no kindness"). The chaos of voices on "Spite Alone Holds Me Aloft" could put 90% of extreme metal bands to shame, and likewise "Day Of Tears And Mourning", with its ambivalence between chaos and religiosity, leaves no room for any stillness. When Hayter aims for string orchestrations with gothic ballads in the style of Nico, she manages to be even more incisive. The brief string intro with Teutonic-valkyrie vocals on "Faithful Servant Friend Of Christ", solemn and evocative, once again betrays both her classical music studies and the music she listened to in her youth.

The nine minutes of "Do You Doubt Me Traitor" are another devastating psychological session, with screams bearing witness to clear autobiographical references ("I don't eat, I don't sleep, I don't eat, I don't sleep, I let it consume me!"). The utterly funereal, alienating march of the piano and the autobiographical lyrics leave Hayter completely laid bare before the listener, perhaps more than ever before. Also interesting is the voice-and-piano experiment "Sorrow! Sorrow! Sorrow!", which edges close to traditional European music.

For the rest, the album doesn't seem as incisive as in the past, though the closing "I Am The Beast" harks back to her finest moments, returning to the usual alternation between two irreconcilable souls locked in struggle. And psychology remains at the heart of the lyrics ("All I want is boundless love, all I know is violence").

As if to counterbalance and restore equilibrium to the album, Kristin Hayter released The Caligula Demos (2020), the first acoustic sketches of what would later become the definitive album. Two souls that this time split apart only to come back together precisely through these demos, which once again mark out the American songwriter as an authentic, deeply felt artist, blessed with a powerful and in some ways unique voice. Piano and voice alone are almost always enough to give Hayter's words their tragic weight, but to this is added a pronounced theatricality, even more clearly perceptible in this stripped-back, hermetic version of the album.

It's precisely this reduction of sound that allows the listener to focus more closely on the vocal potential of the artist and on the classical structure of most of the tracks, making more evident certain aspects that may have gone unnoticed by the many who only got to know Kristin Hayter in 2019, with the ferociously violent Caligula. That very album, while it's the one that brought her greater renown, also pushed into the background the classical, melodic side of her songs that nonetheless remains essential to her poetics.

It's remarkable, then, to hear the long liturgical piano-and-voice passages of tracks like "All Gods Love Means Nothing Now" and "Failure", or the classical sonata of "Fucking Deathdealer". Only two tracks abandon the acoustic setting to return to pure noise: the two minutes of "Beast" and, above all, the splendid "Kirie", a truly religious/liturgical moment worthy of the "Kirie" from the landmark Popol Vuh album, "Hosianna Mantra".

Her love of Bach, the subject of her thesis and the likely true centre of her music, becomes manifest on the EP Agnus Dei (2021), a noise-inflected reworking of the famous Mass in B minor. Just four tracks that represent a clear return to her roots, an attempt to reconnect with her first two LPs — "Let The Evil Of His Own Lips Cover Him" and "All Bitches Die" — still the most representative works of a career that remains very much in progress. Liturgical chant and deafening noise once again coexist, as if the release of the extreme "Caligula" had been a parenthesis with no follow-up until now.

"Agnus Dei (JS Bach)" opens with a sudden wall of harsh noise that might recall the debut masterpiece "That He May Not Rise Again". Hayter's classical singing slowly emerges, with sacred-mass strings deformed by shifting noise lacerations, which make room for the vocal before suddenly seizing the scene back. This duality between liturgy and industrial, while nothing new in her discography, always manages to feel vital and compelling, and on "Agnus Dei" it reaches new heights.

Even closer to the debut album is "In Tongues (Prelude)", with a girl's dialogue and church organs submerged beneath fresh waves of industrial noise, once again managing to fuse beauty and devastation as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Sexless // No Sex" is a cover of hardcore band Iron Lung that continues her familiar theme of violence against women. "Where'er You Walk" unites classical music and literature, turning Handel's music into a soundtrack for modern horrors, joined by a reading of "I Know, You Walk", a poem by Hermann Hesse.

Just sixteen minutes for what might be no more than the prelude to an imminent LP. Few minutes, but powerful and decisive ones, with a mature poetics and musical ideas that feel fully realised.

Sinner Get Ready (2021), her fourth LP, is still centred on the themes of violence against women and revenge, and once again the blend of classicism and noise, lyrical singing and religious fervour is pitch-perfect, bordering on a secular requiem that prays to a vengeful god. The musical grammar, split between the two masterpieces of her early years and a new minimal-songwriter side, makes the extreme violence of Caligula an isolated episode, at least for now. This requiem for sinners and victims is enriched precisely by a songwriter soul à la Nick Cave, particularly on the tracks chosen as singles, "Pennsylvania Furnace" and "Perpetual Flame Of Centralia" — the latter one of the most moving songs of her entire career, almost a singer-songwriter ballad written at the piano by John Cale for Nico, telling the story of the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, burned and abandoned, a metaphor for the condition of abused and mistreated women.

"The Order Of Spiritual Virgins", nine minutes clearly close in spirit to All Bitches Die, still moves within Lingua Ignota's familiar poetics, with desperate vocals and sudden noise outbursts. Although the structure is already well known, it retains a ferocity and a power to disturb that's far from easy to find across much of the discography of other dark-noise musicians. The organ of "I Who Bend The Tall Grasses" opens onto an outright prayer for revenge, as cruel as possible. The dark soul of Caligula partly returns, but within a more typically religious structure, even though God is invoked for his cruelty rather than his benevolence ("I don't give a damn, you have to kill him").

Acoustic instruments (likely a banjo) take centre stage on "Many Hands" and "Repent Now Confess Now", fresh invocations of repentance and revenge with a dry, stripped-back sound. Similar — but with the addition of piano — is "Man Is Like A Spring Flower", whose finale is even playful, recalling at times the repetitions of Philip Glass. The prayer closes with "The Solitary Brethren Of Ephrata", halfway between church hymn and Nick Cave's gothic balladry, a track that could open a new phase in Kristin Hayter's career.

Reverend Kristin Michale Hayter

After five years of great suffering magnificently channelled through the Lingua Ignota project, Kristin Hayter decides to firmly turn the page. After swiftly putting the old project to rest with a post on Instagram dated 2 November 2022, she launches a second project under the name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter.

The first act is an album titled Saved!, born, judging from the title, above all as a path toward salvation, a strenuous search for psychological wellbeing after years of turmoil and self-analysis, which sadly ended with the cancellation of her European tour due to health problems.

It's hard to say whether these changes stem from a religious turn, from a newfound optimism, or simply from the physical necessity of no longer being able to push further into her own abyss. Musically, "Saved" marks a coherent evolution that Hayter had already begun with Sinner Get Ready and Agnus Dei, on which screaming had been abandoned in favour of channelling her distress into a more meditative songwriting, still turned inward toward an inextricable malaise.

Musically, Saved! looks back toward American religious music, edging closer to gospel and spirituals without entirely forgetting Kristin Hayter's avant-garde roots. These resurface in the piano prepared with bells and chains, and in the low audio quality achieved through cassette-tape recordings that degrade the sound until it feels little more than amateur. In the final stretch, tape manipulations push the deconstruction to its limit, transforming spiritual singing into experimental episodes, as in the opening three minutes of "I'm Getting Out While I Can", which sound as though they came from a lost recording from the last century.

The deconstruction also hits the blues, as in “All Of My Friends Are Going To Hell” (with a melody reminiscent of “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath), spiritual singing with voice and choir (“There Is Power In The Blood”), and even traditional country (“Precious Lord, Take My Hand”, “Nothing But The Blood”).

But the tracks where Hayter makes the fullest use of her new ideas are the ones where the prepared piano (probably not perfectly tuned) allows her to reach the bleakest atmospheres: the few minutes of “Imudea” are emblematic of how voice, choir and a handful of piano notes, paired with an increasingly degraded sound, can carry us into territory close to that of Hayter's early albums, without resorting to the cathartic screaming that the Lingua Ignota project had accustomed us to.

The sense of abandonment toward a saving god takes over in the two most genuinely religious tracks, “May This Comfort And Protect You” and “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole”, where the bells and chains of the prepared piano vibrate, touching the listener's most intimate feelings. “The Poor Wayfaring Stranger” carries on in the same vein, but with biblical overtones that make us feel up close the loneliness of one who is a stranger in a land not their own.

The longest track, “How Can I Keep From Singing”, closes the album by literally bringing the two projects together and overdubbing them onto one another. The religious singing of Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter invokes her savior, but in the distance the crying and screaming of the old Hayter — that of the Lingua Ignota project — emerges, harrowing, recalling the most tragic moments of Lou Reed's discography, particularly the children's crying on “The Kids” from the album “Berlin”. The (wonderful) singing ends at the six-minute mark, but the crying, sobbing and incomprehensible screaming carry on alone for another two minutes, as if to show that a new life has begun, but the past and its indelible wounds are, and always will be, present.

In 2024 Kristin Hayter continues down the same path with Saved! The Index, a collection of traditional religious songs that underscore how this musical turn is, above all, a turn in her life. Even though the songs come from tradition, the sound is still distinctly that of the American musician, who doesn't disown her roots at all — not even in the most melodic moments built around bel canto, as in the Puritan-derived “Abide With Me”, or in the long voice-and-piano dive of “Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet”, eight minutes of harrowing singing made even more powerful by the sound of the modified piano.

When Hayter finds lyrics with no music attached, she chooses to present them as invocations recorded with nothing but the sound of pouring rain (“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord”), making something that others would surely have discarded both compelling and viable on an LP.

“Satan Your Kingdom Must Fall Down”, “The Christian Life” and “Running For My Life” are among the most telling examples of this new direction, with a blend of tradition and originality that isn't easy to sustain across twelve tracks, and a far-from-trivial ability to reinterpret songs otherwise destined for oblivion.

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