The Unknown Language of a Necessary Revenge

Trigger warning: sexual + domestic abuse, gender-based violence, graphic violence. 

The music of Lingua Ignota is an amalgamation of confrontational, death-industrial, electronic noise and blackened, baroque-classical operatics infused with Roman Catholic iconography. It defies genre and it is hard to listen to in all the right ways. 

Caligula was originally over 90 minutes long. It's an album that's supposed to be dealt with, not enjoyed. Something that's supposed to embody intense trauma, therapeutic violence, and confrontational reckoning. It was pulled back to a more palatable 75 minutes… and then to 66.6 minutes as a little joke. 

Caligula exemplifies a society "on the edge of ruin, the edge of collapse" built from "looking at the abusive power, madness, depravity, and narcissism" that we see in our world, in our communities, and in ourselves as a result of trauma. 

The music re-contextualizes misogyny and violence amidst a music scene, and an industry, where it has been perpetuated.  Explore and you'll find All Bitches Die, "O Ruthless Great Divine Director," and even a cover of Eminem's "Kim."

It's meant to "take you through a cycle of abuse." It has to be punishing. It has to retch with divine vengeance in a world within which there is no justice for the victims of this violence. These are the survival anthems of Lingua Ignota. 

Kristin Hayter was working on her graduate thesis at Brown University when Lingua Ignota was exorcised into being. She collected language from the internet, lyrics from extreme misogynist music, and texts and voicemails from her own life, and she used them in a Markov chain to form a 10,000 page text entitled Burn Everything, Trust No One, Kill Yourself. Hayter decided to make it her body weight in paper in an art installation instead of archiving it away for the academics. Then, she turned it into a song based on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring focusing on the much forgotten girl who dances herself to death for old men. Fitting. From there Lingua Ignota became a music project. 

Hayter's music is a product of her own experiences, re-contextualized for catharsis. One of her abusers was “a very powerful noise musician in the Providence community” and she describes a need for a reckoning within the extreme music scene. 

Advice for recovering from trauma is infested with themes of gentleness, self-love, and mindfulness. For some, this works. To Hayter, this is a sort of "patriarchal model of civilized femininity." Lingua Ignota instead explores other aspects of survivorhood, like rage and despair. 

While Hayter directly confronts the phallocentric systems of power amidst sexual, gender-based, and domestic violence, she receives a lot of criticism from feminists for her use of language that is seen as derogatory toward women. Hayter instead sees her music as a way to reclaim this language as an important part of the work in healing from this trauma. 

These sounds, words, and styles that make up her music are typically dominated by masculinity and masculine usage. Csikszentmihalyi would describe Hayter's diversion from traditional feminine expression as an androgenous characteristic of her personality. But it's much more than that. Her rejection of the socially accepted or "appropriate" ways to process trauma needs to go beyond the constraints of gender norms to reshape the new reality of her survivorhood. And by taking on the words of her abusers, she gets to rewrite what it means to be that survivor.

Hayter describes how difficult it is to process this subject matter. In her creative process, she prefers allegorical expression because it allows her to go outside of her own experiences and instead give it context outside of herself. She said, “I’ve had a difficult time finding justice in the world, finding accountability for the people who have done harm to me… Music is my way of holding people accountable and finding justice. My way of finding revenge.”

Survivors of abuse and trauma don't get to enact violence or kill their abusers. They get mindfulness coloring books, meditation apps, and talks about the importance of self love. Lingua Ignota gives a voice to "the anger that the world tells them they shouldn’t feel."