He said, “Well, let's put you in the studio and blast other people speaking in tongues at you for 90 minutes and see what happens,” she said. “What you hear on the record is actually like one unedited portion of maybe two hours of tongues.”
Hayter blurs performance and reality, as is often the case with art. She is not a Pentecostal, but the project's planning and investigation posed the age-old question of whether an insider, outsider, or both may study a culture.
She spent most of the pandemic researching the denomination as an outsider, collecting and sorting Gospel literature and attending Pentecostal services via Zoom. When recording the CD and experimenting with spiritual disciplines, her inquiry became practice.
It was quite dissociative. I was able to let my brain and language act autonomously. It's unclear what happened. However, it was like releasing something, she remarked.
Young Hayter sung as a Catholic cantor and attended parochial school. Hayter has long been fascinated to religious themes, images, and iconography, despite becoming an atheist as a youth. “I think the ideas of things that are absolutely evil or absolutely good are really interesting to me,” she remarked.
She has “Caligula” tattooed on her chest, the first-century Roman emperor who is commonly linked to religious persecution and sexual deviancy, but historical sources are doubtful. Hayter's prior recording name was a tribute to glossolalia pioneer Hildegard Von Bingen, a 12th-century Benedictine mystic and saint.
Hayter is hardly the only musician to go to religious lengths for art; Grimes, inspired by Von Bingen, secluded herself in her room for weeks to produce “Visions.” Hayter is also aware of how her Brown University master of fine arts distinguishes her.
“My brain works that way,” she replied. “I like this period of research and then doing the thing and being an insurgent. It becomes an addiction and a strange lifelong situation.” An obsession may be accurate. Before the album's release, she co-founded Perpetual Flame Ministries. After adding “reverend,” Hayter opted to become a Universal Life Church ordained minister.
Her avant-garde music addressed serious issues including spousal abuse and anorexia. But recently, she has been recuperating, admitting she has a “much more open sense of what God is and what God can be at this point” and decided to retire her previous recording name and music. For the first time in my adulthood, I have a normal existence. My home life is great. I have a great guy, animals, and a house, she smiled. “So I’m trying to lean into that.”
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