Everything Burns

Throughout the career of Kristen Hayter's extreme metal/industrial/neoclassical project Lingua Ignota, she has produced self-described ‘survivor anthems’ that not only describe misogynistic oppression and brutally violent images of retribution, but whose lyrics do so by routinely employing a disturbing and disorienting tactic of blurring and blending re-presentations of the violent misogynist with those of who suffer at his hands. Thus, although Lingua Ignota's blend of personal reflections on abuse and mental illness with piano-centred music does to some extent place her within the alternative canon of ‘confessional’ female singer-songwriters that includes Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Amanda Palmer, the ‘confessions’ themselves take on a more ambiguous (even ambivalent) air, via the far more fluid use of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ throughout her songs. Hayter's narrative voice rhizomatically ruptures and sutures connections between seemingly disparate subjective positions, speaking as , to , and about the victim, the violator, and God; often assuming more than one role at a time. In this essay, I shall explore certain questions relating to the function of repetition in the work of Lingua Ignota, and how this concept relates to the greater understanding of her creative output as a documentation, negotiation and weaponisation of gendered trauma, most particularly within the scenes and canons of extreme music on one hand, and religious doctrine on the other. In addition to the traditional psychoanalytical association between trauma and repetition, I argue that this can be understood especially through the Deleuzian concept of counter-actualisation and (particularly Mark Fisher's development on) the Derridean notion of hauntology as a means of uncovering, imbricating, and re-distributing traces of male violence and female suffering at the level of both mainstream and alternative cultures throughout history.