LINGUA IGNOTA – CALIGULA (Review)

LINGUA IGNOTA is a one woman experimental artist, and this is her latest album.

Aided by a multitude of guests, (including members of The Body and Full of Hell), this is 66 minutes of beauty and brutality. This is an album that fits in no real category other than a loose experimental one. Peppered with noise, avant-garde, industrial, and post-doom/rock influences, this is music that largely belongs to the artist alone and defies easy categorisation.

Ethereal delicacy and daemonic intensity are unlikely partners, but CALIGULA marries these two usually-opposing states together frequently across these tracks. The hate, fury, and venom you can feel on this album is very real and tangible, but then so is the nuanced introspection and self-awareness.

The artist behind LINGUA IGNOTA is talented and skilled, not only in her vocal performance, (which veers from the beautiful to the terrifying, and is always powerful and delivered with great presence), but also in her ability to craft engrossing music. Across the album the soundscapes that she creates are rich and full, exploring a range of emotions and themes, all darkly rendered with great texture and diversity.

This is not easy listening, but it is immersive. Deeply emotional, personal, and uncomfortably intense, even in the quieter moments, CALIGULA is a rare beast that manages to achieve a synthesis between the harsh nastiness of noise and experimental aggression on one hand, and angelic, atmospheric worldbuilding on the other. Very few artists could combine such disparate extremes into a coherent, enjoyable whole, but this one has.

Utterly essential for any fan of challenging, atypical, and ultimately rewarding music.