THE OUTER LIMITS
They bond with nature and Norse Gods help them create an ‘amplified history’ from early medieval Northern Europe… but are Heilung prog?
When ancient Viking folklore meets New Age spirituality, with pelts, bone instruments and mind-altering healing vibes thrown into the mix, these Nordic YouTube sensations want to unite the world. But is this play-acting, art or a religion? We ask the question: How prog are Heilung? Words: Hannah May Kilroy
WE DO FIELD RECORDINGS. PEOPLE THINK THEY CAN HEAR THINGS LIKE A SYNTHESISER IN OUR MUSIC – BUT IT’S DEFINITELY NOT THERE. ALL THE SOUNDS YOU HEAR ARE REAL. NATURE IS THE BIGGEST INSTRUMENT WE KNOW!
CHRISTOPHER JUUL
The modern world’s relationship with nature is in crisis. As the natural world burns around us and energy-consuming technology envelops our daily lives, our desire to feel a connection to the ground beneath our feet is greater than ever. Perhaps this explains why Heilung are currently resonating so strongly with music fans all around the world.
The trio formed in 2014 with the aim to bring nature and history to life through their own genre that they call ‘amplified history’. As Heilung’s Christopher Juul explains, “Imagine if you took nature and plugged it into a guitar amp.”
Through ancient music, poetry and rhythms, instruments made from bones and a spectacular live visual smorgasbord that features pelts, antlers and wild warrior tribes chanting to ancient gods, Heilung – ‘healing’ in German – aim to provide exactly that, to reconnect a frazzled modern world with nature and history – and to alter peoples’ state of mind.
They clearly tapped into a deepseated need – the band’s very first live performance at Castlefest in 2017 went viral on YouTube, racking up more than 14 million views. It was also the first time that bandmember Kai Uwe Faust had ever performed on a stage. They quickly signed to a label and began headlining festivals around the world. As Juul laughs of their mammoth success: “We wanted to alter peoples’ minds… but we didn’t expect to alter millions of peoples’ minds!”
Prog meets Heilung at Midgardsblot Festival in Norway, where they are headlining the final night. A folkmetal-meets-Viking-reenactment festival (read our review on page 125) near the ancient Viking burial mounds of Borre, it’s the perfect setting to host Heilung’s ritualistic extravaganza. Within minutes of Prog meeting the three core band members in the authentic Viking camp that’s been set up as their home for the weekend, it becomes clear that Heilung is not a performance – it’s a way of life.
Dane Christopher Juul was born into this lifestyle. His father is an Old Norse ‘Godi’ priest and a craftsman who makes rune stones. A thoughtful, wise character with a deep understanding of both music and the business behind it, Juul grew up immersed in Viking reenactments and became a sword fighter before giving that up to focus on music, and starting his own recording studio in Copenhagen,
Lava Studio, that he says “focuses on creating weird music – anything from prog to crossover to world music”.
Juul and his partner and bandmate Maria Franz, a wonderfully warm Norwegian native with a glorious singing voice who spent her childhood playing on the burial mounds of Borre, became close when they met in 2006 at a Viking reenactment festival in Iceland. Soon after they formed Euzen, an alternative progressive rock band.
The final piece of the puzzle was
Kai Uwe Faust, a German tattoo artist specialising in Old Norse tattoos. Tattooed, bearded and barefoot, equal parts playful energy and astute observation, Faust rejected his strict Christian upbringing to pursue a spiritual and Shamanic life, and met the others when he went to record some of his Old Norse poetry in Juul’s recording studio. Juul immediately realised that Faust had something special, and the three began to create music together.
The dynamic was perfect, with Juul and Franz’s musical backgrounds and business sense, Faust’s poetry and connection to the spirit world, and their shared desire to bring history and nature to a brilliant, vibrant life. And of course, the fact that, as Juul dryly notes with a laugh, “We were into all this Viking stuff before it became cool!”
Over two albums, 2015’s Ofnir and this year’s Futha, and one live album, 2017’s Lifa, Heilung have grown organically, with careful thought behind all aspects. As Faust notes, “Everything in Heilung is very complex and has a lot of research around it.” From the historical detail – like the wild warrior choir that joins the band onstage and is based on the Germanic Harii tribe; fans can join, but only if they make it through the rigorous audition process – to the way they actually create the music: building gorgeously multi-layered sounds using actual recordings from nature.
“We do a lot of field recordings,” explains Juul. “People think they can hear things like a synthesiser in our music – but it’s definitely not there.
All the sounds you hear are real. Nature is the biggest instrument we know!”
“There are so many tones and melodies in nature sounds,” Franz adds, “and Chris has a good method for extracting elements from it. For instance, with rain, he will go in and find the frequencies to get some kind of melody from it.”
“On the new album [Futha], the song Elddansurin is created out of fire sounds,” Juul explains. “There is an element of controlled chaos to Heilung: you can’t find any more crazy polyrhymics than in nature, because it’s very chaotic – but it’s not random. It has logic. You hear a water drop in a sink, it had a beat. Anything in nature has a beat.”
Heilung also craft their own instruments, taking inspiration from ancient cultures around the world. For example, Franz plays a ravanahatha, a stringed instrument similar to a violin that was supposedly named after the 10-headed Sri Lankan king Ravana, one of the most revered deities in Hinduism.
“The thing is, you don’t find many instruments here in the north,” Juul says. “So we don’t know much about what people played on here. But we take an artistic approach, and look at other native people and ask, ‘Okay, what did they do?’ Normally if you look far enough back through history, it becomes exactly the same. A drum becomes the same all over the world.”
“Of course we want to incorporate elements that are not from Scandinavia,” Faust adds. “That is also in the nature of the ancient Scandinavians; in northern Norway they have found glass beads produced in what is now Syria; in southern Swedish graves, they have found Buddhas produced in India. So they were travelling. They were curious, they were explorers, and that is what we do as well.”
Then, there are the human bones… “Human bones have an amazing sound,” smiles Franz.
“A lot of people ask about this, and there’s a creepy atmosphere around Heilung sometimes, but I can demystify it!” laughs Faust. “First of all, the possession of human remains is legal in Denmark. So I have a little collection that I got from a collector who bought a whole skeleton from the University of Copenhagen. I’m very respectful of it.”
“It’s a challenge sometimes when we play abroad and show up at the airport with human bones and spears…” laughs Juul.
It isn’t just the human bones that give Heilung a sense of the eerie; their connection to the natural world stretches beyond what the eye can see.
“We prefer to play at night because that’s when the spirits are awake, and we have to incorporate them,” Juul explains. “But once we had to play a show in daylight. Kai came to me and said, ‘I talked to the spirits and they said we could do it in daytime’ – and he looks me right in the eye – and he said, ‘But one of us has to wear a woman’s dress.’”
All three laugh at this memory. “I was sure I’d have to wear a bridal dress or something!” laughs Juul, while Faust says that, to Juul’s relief, he was the one who wore the dress.
“But what I mean is that we have to honour the spirits,” Juul explains. “Sometimes this increases the difficulty levels when we have to bring that to a live show.”
“That’s generally the challenge,” Faust continues. “When you go into a trance, you are not meant to be surrounded by electrical things. When spiritual workers go into that state they always have at least one helper who makes sure they don’t fall into a fire or something! [Laughs] So for me, every show is a deep challenge for one side to keep contact with that invisible world.”
Heilung’s casual chat about the spirits might have more sceptical readers rolling their eyes, but there’s also a science behind what they do. Faust’s shamanic work is rooted in the work of Dr Michael Harner, an anthropologist who developed ‘core shamanism’, to help the western world connect to shamanism, in part through using scientific research.
“Heilung consciously aim to alter your state of mind,” Faust says firmly. “There has been a lot of research done on this specific drum rhythm that you can find all over the world, that activates certain parts of your brain and has been used to go into a trance, but is also used nowadays for relieving
birth pain, even dentists use it. You can actually measure it if you expose your brain to it for long enough.”
Prog admittedly wasn’t expecting such a scientific explanation…
“It has to be like that,” Faust says. “Nowadays you can’t go around talking about shamans and healing… everybody’s like, ‘Yeah right!’ [Laughs]
“Spirituality and science were split several centuries ago, and now we have two concepts that we have to serve.
It’s all about balance.”
“That is spirituality,” adds Juul.
“It’s giving a head-focused society an access to that deeper layer,” Faust adds.
Homemade instruments, their own genre, taking polyrhymics from the natural world – there’s evidence to argue the case, but do Heilung feel as though they fit into the prog world?
“I’m a huge fan of progressive music,” says Franz excitedly. “I love it when there is contrasting, exciting stuff, anything that tickles my mind.”
“We could talk from now until the end of the year about progressive music…” laughs Juul. “I am educated in music so the method is interesting to me. Back when it initially began and there were a couple of bands [doing prog], it was to experiment with something that is out of the ordinary, right? With ‘amplified history’, which is literally what we do, you could call that progressive in itself. We amplify nature and make it more audible, more visible, and there are definitely progressive elements in that.”
The effect that Heilung visibly have on their audience has been staggering. They have had letters from listeners who have experienced relief from everything from tinnitus to trauma through their music. It’s something that has touched Heilung deeply, and emphasises their desire for people to connect with nature, and to each other.
“As Christopher said earlier, if you go far back enough in history, you will see that we are all the same,” adds Faust. “In Northern Norway, they found a bullroarer from the early Stone Age. Then you go to Australia, the other end of the planet, and they also use it. We are one at some point. And if you look at the science, we all go back to some weird two-cell thing in the water. I think we should remember that in the end, we really all are brothers.”
“This is about more than just a fascination with history,” Franz says. “We’re living in troubling times and people are troubled. By their minds, how to react towards themselves and their surroundings, they feel like strangers and don’t know how to connect with the land or with others. It’s a horrible state to be in, and many are confused about how to deal with this. They seek deeper to find meaning, to feel connected. It’s very beautiful to be part of something that we can see can help some people to overcome.”
Futha is out now via Season Of Mist.
See www.facebook.com/amplifiedhistory.
WE WERE INTO ALL THIS VIKING STUFF BEFORE IT BECAME COOL!
CHRISTOPHER JUUL