Lingua Ignota – “Perpetual Flame Of Centralia”
Classically trained vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Kristin Hayter, better known as Lingua Ignota, is releasing the new album Sinner Get Ready next month. The LP was inspired by the derelict landscape of rural Pennsylvania and its god-fearing religiosity, and we’ve already heard “Pennsylvania Furnace.” Today, she’s sharing “Perpetual Flame Of Centralia,” a minimal, piano-led meditation on the blood of Christ.
The song’s music video, shot by Emily Birds, is a collaboration with fashion designer and Sargent House artist Ashley Rose Couture. “I asked her to design a piece indebted to 17th-century Dutch costume, and she returned with a gown with a 20-foot train and a magisterial lace collar exploding with pearls,” Hayter says. As she explains:
I first saw Ashley’s work long before I was able to wear it, and it spoke to me as a longtime fan of the aesthetics and theory of fashion. Her designs transform the wearer into something outside themselves, armor that allows one to embody fantasy or nightmare. Working collaboratively with Ashley has been a dream, I have been able to explore the ideas of my record with wearable art. I chose to wear her mask on the cover of SINNER GET READY because it held the sharp dichotomy of my music; it was chaste and erotic, exquisite and grotesque. For the PERPETUAL FLAME OF CENTRALIA video, the expressive capacity of her garments are meditated upon in juxtaposition to the stark, desolate quality of my song. It is the material vs. the immaterial, and the result is languid and dreamy and wonderfully claustrophobic.
Rose adds:
Upon meeting Kristin, I felt a genuine connection, both personal and creative, which has only grown this past year working together. To watch someone turn so much pain into art and continue to pick themself up and push on over and over again is exactly what this collection is about. I want the person who wears these pieces to feel strong and empowered no matter how overwhelming or suffocating life can become. Even when it continues to return. You can keep fighting or let the fog swallow you.
Watch and listen below.
Sinner Get Ready is out 8/6 on Sargent House.