Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter announces her debut record, SAVED!, out on October 20th via Perpetual Flame Ministries

Kristin Hayter, the interdisciplinary artist formerly known as Lingua Ignota, has announced SAVED!, the debut record 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. Accompanying the record’s announcement, comes the video for the first single, “ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL”, which follows Hayter into baptism. The video was filmed, directed and edited in its entirety by Hayter herself.

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, but 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! will be released on October 20th via Perpetual Flame Ministries. Pre-orders are now available here.

Photo credit: Rev. Herschel B. Rutherford