This past Valentine’s Day, Lingua Ignota (the musical outpost of Providence-based artist Kristin Hayter) released LET THE EVIL OF HIS OWN LIPS COVER HIM, a full-length which was spun from Hayter’s concurrent performance/installation “BURN EVERYTHING TRUST NO ONE KILL YOURSELF.”
As Hayter describes the piece on her website:
BURN EVERYTHING has many moving parts. its basis is a document 10,000 pages in length. This document is composed exclusively of appropriated material: lyrics, message board posts, and liner notes from subgenres of extreme music that mythologize misogyny, such as: black metal, hardcore, harsh noise, power electronics, grindcore, and with particular attention to pornogrind, a subset of grindcore with lyrical content that graphically details sexual violence. this document also contains court papers, audio recordings, and police filings from my own experiences of violence. the 10,000 pages were assembled using a markov chain in Shannon’s nomenclature in orders three and four.
… my objective was to utilize the language and symbology of extreme music to create work that would help to articulate real trauma for survivors of violence. thus, i focused on imagery such as: black-and-white, high-contrast, serial killers, destruction and ruin mostly through fire (hence BURN EVERYTHING), nihilist and fascist imagery, women’s bodies, religious iconography, and explicit language. these tropes are so over-used in extreme music they have become ambient, but I seek to imbue them with meaning by recontextualizing them.
LET THE EVIL is an overwhelmingly powerful experience — in the density of its ideas, in its conceptual ambition, in the clarity of its emotion. Joining the languages of noise and religious music to find the ground common to both of them, Hayter has created something remarkable and unforgettable — a masterpiece of extreme music which, by invoking trauma in order to heal it, transforms each listen into a transfiguration of pain.
You can stream the video for the album’s centerpiece, “THAT HE MAY NOT RISE AGAIN,” right here. LET THE EVIL OF HIS OWN LIPS COVER HIM is available through Lingua Ignota’s Bandcamp. All proceeds will be used to benefit the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
More about: Lingua Ignota
