SAVED! is an apocalyptic revelation on the complex, sometimes ugly, 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 dictate that one’s closeness to God is demonstrated through transcendental personal experience. Sonically and thematically, the record is both a logical conclusion to and a significant departure from Hayter’s previous work as Lingua Ignota. 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. Musically, while she continues to use historical avant-garde technique 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.”

To evoke the lonely roads of salvation-seeking, SAVED! is stark, confined mostly to vocals (sometimes overdubbed into a dissonant chorus of twelve simultaneous voices) and piano prepared with bells and chains, the earthly and celestial. Speaking in tongues is achieved by self-imposing a variety of conditions; sleep deprivation, fasting, repetition of prayer, and sensory overstimulation. Working 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. Tape manipulation techniques provide additional effects of deteriorating texture. 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. Here solace is found in absolute retreat from the world, far from pain and sin, burning with the holy fire until the end comes. And it is written: as you are when the end comes, so will you be when you must face Him. Whether this is enlightenment or insanity is up to the listener to decide.