Lingua Ignota
Oozing Wound
Thalia Hall
December 21st
The always decorated Thalia sign board / đź“· : -Mick Reed
With the solstice in full transition and the sun slowly coming back to life, it’s a good time for reflection and contemplation of the year behind us. Sometimes this calls for a mug of hot cocoa, a blanket nest perched on the couch, a book of ghost stories and a three hour Enya playlist, and sometimes it calls for being shocked back to your senses by depictions of cruelty and a confrontation with the abuse heaped upon us by those who purportedly care the most. On December 21, 2019, I chose the latter and I don’t regret it. I have the rest the year to get cozy with my partner in my living room. Sometimes it’s better to feel the heat of someone else burning off their gas-lighting to remind you of the validity of your own emotions. It helps keep things in perspective.
This past Saturday, Thalia Hall hosted Lingua Ignota aka Kristin Hayter “In the Round,” with locals Oozing Wound opening (no pun intended). In the Round, if you didn’t know, is a concert series where Thalia promoters invite artists to perform on the floor of the theater on a raised platform centered in the middle of where the audience would normally stand. In my experience, these ground level performances are vastly superior and encourage spontaneous audience participation in the artist’s set. When I saw Tacocat “In the Round” a few years back they brought smoke machines, inflatable pool toys, and laser light displays that made their performance feel like an outtake from a sci-fi thriller about Martian surf feminists, who crash landed in the middle of Chicago and decided to throw a party to liberate us all from the chains of the patriarchy. This past Saturday was equally evocative, but in a completely different way.
Before I go any farther into this recap, I need to apologize for the images (or lack thereof). Thalia Hall did not allow any video or photography that evening. I had a camera with me when I went through security and it almost prevented me from entering the venue. Having to talk my way past security and the promoter put me in a fairly foul mood by the time I made it to the stage and I was thankful for the wall of caustic sound Oozing Wound had conjured with their stringed wizard stick in time for my arrival. I love Oozing Wound and I’m glad that their album this year, High Anxiety, has made it on to several best of lists for 2019, however I’m perpetually annoyed and perplexed by the narrative that surrounds them. They’re a very good thrash-sludge metal band, with a lot of appeal to normie non-metal heads, but the way most indie beat writers describe them will leave you more confused than if you just bought their record or stopped in on one of their shows (to be clear, just because “music critics” ie. someone who is inexplicably paid to write about music have no idea what they are talking about, doesn’t mean the band they are writing about isn’t doing amazing things, it just means that they aren’t qualified to write about this or that metal band [or any musician really]). What Oozing Wound plays won’t be shocking to anyone familiar with Voivod, but will hook those with a passing interest in the aisle-crossing arm-wrestle between punk and metal that’s been raging since roughly 1982. In sum, Oozing Wound play conceptually heavy punk-infused, gummy thrash, sure to viscerally please the ugly, reptilian corners of your brain. I was feeling better about the whole situation after Ole Oozy had thundered through their set and ordered a tall can of Modelo to sip while I waited for Hayter’s crew to set up their gear.
It was around this time that I started to take notice of the crowd. I can honestly say that I’ve never witnessed so many fitness goths in one place in my entire life. You know the type. Long, sleek people in black athleisure apparel, with pentagram tattoos, who look like they spend six hours on a Peloton per day, and zero hours in direct sunlight. Yes, you they know who they are. The crowd skewed quite a bit younger than the majority of metal shows I attend as well. They were curious little scamps to boot. At one point a girl leaned over my shoulder to ask what I was reading (and yes, I brought a book, I always bring a book). That night I happened to have with me Material Cultures, a collection a material ethnographic essays edited by University of Chicago professor of anthropology Daniel Miller. She seemed genuinely curious, but didn’t ask any follow up questions after I told her what I was thumbing through between sets, which was good because the book is kind of dry and not particularly easy (or interesting) to explain to others.
Lingua Ignota didn’t take long to set up. Her equipment consisted of a laptop, keyboard, folding table, plastic trap and high-wattage bulbs in cheap aluminum lamps. It took about two minutes to set up, but the memories it created will last a lifetime. I’m not going to recount the tale of Lingua Ignota’s 2019 album Caligula here. The abusive relationship that serves as its inspiration recounted in numerous interviews dispersed throughout the internet, and the details of her torture and psychic wounds are enumerated in deep, metaphorical detail, throughout the album. However, these realities are inseparable from her performances, and the weight which lead singer and songwriter Kristin Hayter lifts off of her audience and places on her own shoulders during her performances is nothing short of an Iron Man (Iron Person?) level exercise of psychic-death.
Lingua Ignota performed the majority of her latest album that night, alone, on stage. Her combination of noise rock, black metal, and Catholic motifs extends the conciseness of heavy metal into the 21st century with alarming velocity. Shrieking into the microphone, crawling onto the table that held her laptop and slithering amongst folds of the plastic sheath that lay atop it like a snake through mud. A creature made venomous by another’s hatred and poison. Periodically she would wander into the audience, lamp in hand, reciting incantations while allowing the light to pendulate between her fingers like a metaphor for the passage of time, day to night, night to day, while the mind brined in a depressive soup of anxiety and self-hatred. Later she would turn her lamps upon the audience before beating them against her chest until the bulb inside burst like the tiny glass figurine of a ballerina sentenced to be pulverized by a rock crusher. I can’t articulate how much this kind of a performance, this rebellion against the forces of domination and straining against the chains of your one’s own mental cell were needed this time of year. The Holidays aren’t fun for everyone. Many people’s family situations are not ideal and are fraught with manipulation, stress, and erasure. While Lingua Ignota’s music doesn’t speak directly to these bitter family dynamics, her music captures the feeling of emotional homelessness, closeted grief, and wandering bare-footed pain that many experience this time of year. Her music exists to reassure people of the validity of their emotions, and the freedom that can come from speaking one’s truth out loud. It may not be the happy holiday message that your relatives’ flatly jovial social media posts invoke but it’s an important and freeing message that is necessary to hear this time of year. I don’t have photographs to prove it, but Lingua Ignota’s message is none the less diminished. You are valid. Your feelings are real. And someone hears, but not just that, understands your pain.
Happy Holidays from Chicago Crowd Surfer. Be good yourself in 2020.