Meet the intense LINGUA IGNOTA.
Pornogrind, serial killers and funeral marches. Welcome to one of 2019’s most fascinatingly intense music experiences
When Faithful Servant
Friend Of Christ, the opening track of Lingua Ignota’s new album, Caligula, segues into Do You Doubt Me Traitor, the vocals of its creator, Kristin Hayter, twist from hauntingly operatic into a wracked lamentation and howls of vengeance. It’s raw, harrowing, and sets the tone for an elaborate and labyrinthine album of almost unbearable intensity.
“I try to take the cruelty that’s used against you to make yourself powerful,” Kristin explains. With Lingua Ignota, she speaks directly to survivors of domestic violence and abuse, incorporating industrial, noise, metal and classical elements into a disparate but carefully constructed work of art. Growing up Catholic in California, Kristin discovered her aptitude for singing in a church choir and began classical training from the age of 10. Even then, she was interested in the darker side of music.
“I wasn’t into the stuff that my teachers wanted me to sing – cute and frilly music,” she explains. “I wanted to sing melancholic stuff, like Russian art songs and strange things from the 1100s!” Kristin prepared all through high school to sing classic music professionally, but decided instead to study art.
“My experience at art school was invaluable to the way I make things,” she says of her time at the Art Institute of Chicago. “I was interested in taking things that didn’t make sense together and trying to make something new.”
Kristin developed these conceptual ideas further when she did a Master of Fine Arts at Brown University while also becoming involved in the DIY noise scene in Providence. It was through her thesis there, entitled Burn Everything Trust No One Kill Yourself, that Lingua Ignota, Latin for ‘unknown language’, properly began.
“At the time I was in a nasty domestic violence situation that I was trying to get out of,” Kristin says. “I was finding that it was difficult to get help. So I started making work about domestic violence and misogynist attitudes.”
Kristin took passages of misogynist text from sources like pornogrind lyrics and extreme music message boards, and culled the hateful language through a predictive text system known as a Markov chain.
“I took Stravinsky’s The Rites Of Spring, which is also about violence against women,” she continues,
“and I put all of this language into the structure for The Rites Of Spring, and made songs. Some of these songs are on my first EP [Let the Evil of His Own
Lips Cover Him, 2017].”
Soon after this she made her first album, All Bitches Die, taking violent content and reclaiming it, while in desperate circumstances herself.
“Four days after [I escaped the domestic violence situation], I was in another abusive relationship for two years,” she explains. “All Bitches Die was written while I was in that second relationship: it’s about survivor violence, and the phenomenon of a survivor turning violence back on their abuser. It came from a very dark place.”
You can hear this in All Bitches Die, an anguished work that crashes violently from crushing noise to passages of intricate melodic beauty.
“I take a deconstructed approach to making music,” Kristin says on her sound. “It’s not like I want to make noise or metal or a particular genre, but I look at devices within different genres to see what will be the most effective for a song. I look at what I think constitutes heavy music and how to convey this very upsetting content, how to play with that, or how I can flip it into something else so that it sounds totally different.”
With her neW, second album, Caligula, Kristin has constructed a vast, multi-layered explorative body of work that examines abuse of power, using the Roman emperor Caligula as core inspiration.
“I wanted to address the gross climate that we live in, with abuse of
power everywhere. Caligula was this horrible, depraved person in power, but also his entire family was murdered, and his close council later murdered him, so the album is about this endless cycle of violence begetting violence.
“I was thinking of the structural format of an opera, of operatic terms like an overture and leitmotifs,” she continues, “and those things appear on the record.” The album is also full of references; the first released track, Butcher Of The World, takes influence from Henry Purcell’s The Funeral March For Queen Mary, which Kristin says has a long history of cultural violence and gender, and was used in the films Caligula and A Clockwork Orange.
“[The album is] so elaborate, and I feel like such a dork with all the references I put in there,” Kristin laughs. “But there are also jokes,” she adds, referring to SORROW! SORROW! SORROW! The song is a heart-rending, grating vocal performance, which is then interrupted by the voice of a well-known musician complaining while eating a sandwich.
“I felt it was so perfect,” laughs Kristin. “Not only making fun of myself, but also I think people are going to say it ruins the song. That’s the point. That’s how it feels to have people talking through my live set.”
Kristin’s live shows have become a talking point. She plays in the centre of her audience, in darkness apart from lights that she swings around, with video projections of the California wildfires, and recordings of serial killer Aileen Wuornos – “Aileen is the ultimate paradigm of the victim monster: somebody who was failed her entire life by everyone around her, and went mad from the abuse she endured. I wanted to create an immersive experience that changes the relationship between the audience and the performer,” Kristin continues. “Some performers are confrontational with the audience, but I don’t like to do that. We all have to share suffering together somehow, so you might be lit, or I might come up behind you. But I’m not going to smack you or anything. That’s just for me!”
She laughs, but did she did recently injure herself on her European tour, getting a concussion when she hit herself in the head with a light.
“I had a compound concussion,” she says, “and I tried to keep going but I couldn’t and had to cancel my last shows. It was a learning experience. I’m working on new modes of preserving myself while playing, while still maintaining that level of intensity.”
For Kristin, the intensity of Lingua Ignota has been a way to heal.
“When women and marginalised people suffer, we don’t get to see justice in the way that we want. The people who we want held accountable are not. So for me, the music has been the way I’ve been able to get through this, to find justice, and to find any amount of peace.”
CALIGULA is out now via Profound Lore
“We all have to share suffering together”
Kristin Hayter