Kristin Hayter, the interdisciplinary artist formerly known as Lingua Ignota, has announced SAVED!, the debut album under her new moniker, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter. Sonically and thematically, the record is both a logical conclusion to and a significant departure from Hayter’s previous work. Mirroring her personal evolution away from pain, she sheds the moniker that made her successful for its unflinching expression of lived trauma and instead builds herself anew, claiming her full given name, determined to see value within. Today hear the first song, “ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL”, which arrives with a video that follows Hayter into baptism. The video was filmed, directed, & edited in its entirety by Hayter.
“I Will Be With You Always” is as stripped-down a performance as Hayter has ever released and arrives with a video filmed in the basement of her rural New England home.
She has also announced the debut performance under the new moniker for 25th January, 2024, at the world-renowned Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall. Tickets for the concert go on sale this Friday, September 22nd, with presales beginning tomorrow. Hayter notes of the honour;
“I cannot express how wildly grateful I am to have the opportunity to play at Carnegie Hall for my first performance as the Rev, it doesn’t seem real. I will be playing a piano that the world’s greatest pianists have played, and giving my voice to a room where the world’s greatest vocalists and personal idols of mine have sung. What a privilege and honour it is for me to be added to the unending energy of that room.”
Sonically and thematically, the record is both a logical conclusion to and a significant departure from Hayter’s previous work. Mirroring her personal evolution away from pain, she sheds the moniker that made her successful for its unflinching expression of lived trauma and instead builds herself anew, claiming her full given name, determined to see value within.
Musically, while she continues to use historical avant-garde techniques and formal constraints superimposed over accessible frameworks, she also strips down her instrumentation and degrades audio to provide a sense of musicological antiquity. Similar to Lingua Ignota, the record is steeped in pathos, but now the wrath of God gives way to His deliverance: “His boundless love shall make you whole.” SAVED! is an apocalyptic revelation on the complex, sometimes ugly, always nonlinear process of healing. Herein, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter documents an earnest attempt to achieve salvation through the tenets of charismatic Christianity, focusing on the Pentecostal-Holiness Movement, which dictates that one’s closeness to God is demonstrated through transcendental personal experience. Consisting of both gospel standards and originals, Hayter worked with long-time collaborator Seth Manchester to achieve a sound that is without era or place, high-fidelity recordings of each song were committed to a 4-track recorder, and then further degraded in a series of small half-broken cassette players. The result is an artifact that sounds lost to decay, forgotten, as though never meant to be heard. This is all in service of the message — that in its quest for salvation and healing SAVED! is a renunciation of life.
SAVED! TRACK LISTING
I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN
ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL
THERE IS POWER IN THE BLOOD
IDUMEA
PRECIOUS LORD, TAKE MY HAND
MAY THIS COMFORT AND PROTECT YOU
THE POOR WAYFARING STRANGER
NOTHING BUT THE BLOOD
I KNOW HIS BLOOD CAN MAKE ME WHOLE
HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING