After retiring her Lingua Ignota project last summer, Kristin Hayter reemerged as the Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter. Her debut under that name, SAVED!, presented gothic, avant-garde spirituals that explored the more haunted side of old time religion. Today she’s offered up a companion piece, SAVED! The Index, which compiles outtakes from the SAVED! sessions. It’s a wealth of music, 12 hymns in total, and the lo-fi approach plus Hayter’s fearlessly weird performances lend the project an unhinged, unnerving quality.

A note from Hayter on Bandcamp:

SAVED! at its inception was a compendium of hymns, how far could I go and how many I could record. Presented here is a selection of unreleased recorded work from the SAVED! sessions, which Seth and I began referring to as The Index. Featuring works as disparate as “A Beautiful Life” from the Western-themed children’s show “Howdy Doody” to the puritanical English choral piece “Abide With Me” and the Pentecostal “Running For My Life” — as well as field recordings muttered to one’s self on the porch in the rain, the index features a variety of tones and sources arranged with my special unhinged panache. A hymn I found lyrics to but could not find music to,: “O Death Where Is Thy Sting,” left me to compose on my own, as is the case with a few other works here and on SAVED! — Blind Willy Johnson’s “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” does not use his music but recontextualizes his lyrics — draws attention to the complicated history of sacred music, how cultural shifts, oral histories, the advent of recording, systemically forgotten legacies, and appropriation make the origins of so much of this music very difficult to pinpoint; forgotten-ness, a major theme from SAVED!. This index also features, for the glossolalia die-hards out there (a small subsection to be sure) the extended version of the tongues recording that appears on SAVED! in all its feral weirdness, ending with laughter (??) that I could not control. Please enjoy.

Listen below.

SAVED! The Index is out now on Perpetual Flame Ministries.