The bones that embody an album can take many shapes. They may tell a story, follow a genre or soundtrack a movie.
But because of her interest in religion and her education in art, literature and linguistics, Kristin Hayter found herself in a singular position to embark on a type of anthropological experiment through her latest album.
Released under the name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, “Saved!” is an idea album which explores a fictionalized conversion to Pentecostalism.
“When people ask me like, ‘What is it?’ I’m like — I truthfully don’t know what to say,” she says of her album, ahead of the second of two recent performances on the Masonic Lodge at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Forever Cemetery. “It’s imagined to sound type of like found sound, field recordings, that type of thing.”
Although not attempting to portray a real conversion or create a chunk of historical research, Hayter, who previously recorded under the moniker Lingua Ignota, used the album to meditate on how people tell stories about their perceived realities. As she made it, she found herself fascinated with the concept of documentary storytelling and “what’s edited out and what we decide to go away in.”
“Saved!” is made up of a mixture of recognizable Christian hymns, including “Nothing however the Blood of Jesus” and “How Can I Keep from Singing,” in addition to original and sometimes more subversive tracks like “All of My Friends Are Going to Hell.”
That range reflects Hayter’s following, from devout Christians — including a snake handler from West Virginia who prolonged to her an open invitation — to those vehemently against religion.
“I used to be expecting more outrage,” she said plainly. “But I feel there’s enough ambiguity in it and the anomaly is pretty intentional, where I’m not requesting or requiring people to have any type of particular response. Your experience goes to dictate what you hear.”
To emphasize that “found sound” approach, Hayter recorded in a lo-fi style, often abruptly ending or fading out and in of a song. Hayter’s powerful voice, accompanied by her prepared piano, vacillates between beautiful and terrifying in a way not unlike the best way during which she thinks about religion.
“Lots of the language surrounding Christianity really is kind of beautiful and poetic but can be, or can be, pretty horrifying,” she said.
But Hayter doesn’t just utilize her voice for singing on “Saved!” Woven throughout is her attempt at glossolalia — speaking in tongues — a defining feature of Pentecostalism, in accordance with Grant Wacker, a historian at Duke Divinity School who makes a speciality of the denomination.
“It’s necessary to know how fundamental speaking in tongues is to the identity of historic Pentecostals,” Wacker said, recalling the pressure he himself witnessed to talk in tongues growing up within the church.
That Hayter turns such a sacred and integral aspect of the religion right into a performance, while cultivating conditions that might bring the act of speaking in tongues about, might be taken as disingenuous. But Wacker says similar tactics are ceaselessly employed inside the Pentecostal church.
“The pastor would encourage young people — normally teenagers — they’d say ‘Well, just start talking faster and faster, and before long, your tongue will just fall into it,’” he said.
Wacker explained that so long as attempts at glossolalia are done in a “worshipful context,” tactics could be employed to realize it. For Hayter, those included sleep deprivation, fasting and listening to others speak in tongues, an idea from her producer and recording engineer, Seth Manchester.
“He was like, ‘Well, let’s put you within the studio and blast other people speaking in tongues at you for 90 minutes and see what happens,’” she recalled. “What you hear on the record is definitely like one unedited portion of possibly two hours total of speaking in tongues.”
As is commonly the case with art, the road between performance and reality is a blurry one for Hayter. While she would under no circumstances describe herself as a Pentecostal, the preparation and research required for the project raised the age-old query within the study of faith: whether an insider, outsider or each can study a practice.
She spent much of the pandemic researching the denomination as a transparent outsider, meticulously procuring and sifting through countless Gospel tracts and attending Pentecostal worship services behind a distant screen on Zoom. But her research bled into practice when it got here time to record the album and experiment with what could be considered spiritual disciplines.
“It was really pretty dissociative. I used to be capable of just type of let my brain go and let language and the brain type of act independently or something. I’m not entirely sure what happened. But it definitely felt like releasing something,” she said.
Hayter attended parochial school as a child and sang as a cantor within the Catholic Church. Though she was for years a devout atheist after denouncing her faith as a youngster, Hayter has long been drawn to spiritual concepts, imagery and iconography.
“I feel the ideas of things which can be absolutely evil or absolutely good are really interesting to me,” she said.
Across her chest, she is tattooed with the name “Caligula” — the notorious first century Roman emperor who — though the veracity of historical accounts is questionable — is commonly related to religious persecution and sexual deviancy. Hayter’s previous recording name was an ode to the twelfth century Benedictine mystic and saint, Hildegard Von Bingen, an epochal figure within the history of glossolalia.
Hayter is hardly the primary musician in recent memory to commit to spiritual extremes for the sake of art — Grimes, also inspired by Von Bingen, famously locked herself in her room for weeks to make the album “Visions.” But Hayter can be cognizant of the ways during which her academic background — she has a master of positive arts from Brown University — make her distinct.
“It’s just the best way that my brain works,” she said. “I do like this era of research after which this era of doing the thing and being type of like an insurgent inside the thing. And it becomes like a weird life-filling situation, an obsession.”
Calling it an obsession won’t be an exaggeration. She co-founded her current label, Perpetual Flame Ministries, ahead of the album’s release. And once she settled on adding “reverend,” Hayter decided she might as well get ordained within the Universal Life Church.
Her past work encapsulated avant-garde sounds that tackled dark topics, including her experience with domestic abuse and anorexia.
But more recently, her journey has been certainly one of healing — even conceding she has a “far more open sense of what God is and what God could be at this point” — and so felt it was time to retire her old recording name and music.
“For the primary time in my adult life, I actually have a traditional life now. I actually have a extremely nice home life. And I actually have a stunning boyfriend and the cats and the home,” she said with a smile. “So I’m trying to essentially lean into that.”
