Heilung: Healing The Present
HEILUNG exists on the boundary of tradition and innovation. This liminal space has proven to be fruitful ground for artists and musicians to sow the seeds of success, but the pan-Nordic collective aims at something far greater and less tangible than record sales. Meaning ‘healing’ in German, HEILUNG is a salve to the stresses and strains of the present day through the practice of ‘amplified history’ – ancestral rites half-excavated and half-imagined for a modern audience. Possessed of a peculiar intensity, the band has become beloved of metalheads worldwide, and have now firmly embedded themselves in the European heavy music landscape. We spoke to HEILUNG vocalist and channeler-in-chief Kai Uwe Faust ahead of the release of their third studio Drif to hear about the band’s roots, as well as their distinctive approach to music and performance.
“The musical elements of HEILUNG were being laid out by Maria [Franz] and Chris [Juul] long before I joined,” explains Faust. “Chris’ father is a music teacher, so he was playing the piano before he could walk, and Maria was involved in bands making traditional or folk music long before someone put a microphone in my face,” he smiles. “Those two took me under their wings to show me how to do pretty much everything. My musical background is rooted in shamanism, and I never thought much of it until I met Chris and Maria.”
Seeing HEILUNG performing live is much more like witnessing a ceremony than it is like watching a conventional rock band, and the spirituality of the band has been central to their distinctive approach from the very beginning. “I encountered Core Shamanism when I was a teenager, which was first synthesised by a man called Michael Harner,” Faust explains. “For a long time, he studied these shamanic practices from the outside, and was interested in the mythology and spirituality of people all over the world. At some point he took ayahuasca, which broadened his view of the whole thing. From his studies he extracted the core elements of all of these traditions, and it became quite popular in the eighties and nineties.”
“I learned a lot from practitioners of Core Shamanism, and from nature itself,” he continues. “You perform songs in shamanism, but you’re not performing it for beauty or entertainment. That’s just not the approach. Instead, the song is seen as a vessel to support a ritual or ceremony. It’s a way of transferring energy.” The collective’s first performance at Castlefest back in 2017 was a striking debut: ‘ritual’ and ‘ceremony’ get bandied about a lot in metal circles, but here we felt that we were watching an ancestral rite being performed with utmost sincerity and skill. That evening was captured for posterity, and can be seen and heard on the Lifa live album.
“This is a proper ritual,” Faust declares, “and we are not here to entertain,” he adds. “At the opening, one of us comes forth with a cleansing ritual to cleanse the space to invite our invisible helpers (the spirits) and then we carry out the ceremony. We finish it in a very deliberate way, too. It has all the elements of a ritual, and it works. A lot of people experience a trance-like state watching us and they become a part of it,” he observes. “We perform our ritual with the audience, and when I am on stage that is where I am completely immersed and become free to channel the healing energies that lie in the sounds.”
Jamming out tracks in a rehearsal space was never going to be an option for HEILUNG. Their inspiration lies far outside the constraints of the studio. “Whenever I’m out in nature in a sacred place, or wherever there’s a very strong natural presence, I get melodies or lyrics as inspiration, and sometimes sounds that are not really part of this world which I try to recreate later in the studio. Chris and Maria are much more grounded. In their hands it really takes off; what I come up with is usually very raw. The moment they start working with it, extracting sounds and melodies from my recordings, that’s where a certain type of magic happens that has nothing to do with trance and ritual and so on.”
Drif (or ‘gathering’) is a truly eclectic collection of songs and poems, spells and curses. Opening track Asja is a love song possessed of a remarkable primordial beauty, while Tenet is musically and lyrical palindromic, based on the famous ‘Sator square’. Keltentrauer is an unusual highlight: an immersive piece of dramatised spoken word narrating the clash of the Celtic tribes with the Roman army. That rich variety is keenly anticipated on the album’s cover. Before he joined HEILUNG, Faust worked as a tattoo artist by trade, and his distinctive runic style has become more and more embedded into the project’s artworks.
“The artwork for Drif is actually a bit different,” he explains, “because this time I started with a tarot card set. The first nine cards are incorporated into the artwork, and that concept will continue for the next few albums. It was a beautiful process for me,” he remembers. “We were all ‘grounded’ (as you know) and that gave me the time to find the parallels [in Tarot] to the teachings of northern mythologies, and to really dive into it all. I was working at a pace not dictated by a deadline, so I spent a lot of time researching it all, and it was a very fulfilling process. I’m very happy with how it all turned out,” he beams.
On paper it’s not obvious that metalheads should have such an affinity with HEILUNG’s assuredly traditional sound. “To me it is not surprising at all,” comments Faust. “I’ve always been a metalhead. The moment I began to choose my own music, it was always rough and tough music. It’s a world I’m very comfortable with. It’s where I grew up. BATHORY and early IMMORTAL had this kind of mythological spirit to it, and that’s where I was focussed. Early AMON AMARTH, too. We always say that HEILUNG is that music we wanted to hear but couldn’t find. A lot of metalheads have this same excitement about HEILUNG, so it’s not a surprise: afterall, one of the three hearts beating in HEILUNG is a pure metal heart!”
“There’s a metal kid inside me permanently freaking out at these festivals,” he continues. “At Tuska Open Air, we were playing right before SLAYER on their last ever tour. I admired them before I even had a beard. I have never packed my gear so fast! I ran to see the last twenty minutes of SLAYER, and it was a total blast. That was the best moment for me in HEILUNG.” As for the band’s ambitions and future? “Well if you call your band ‘healing’ that’s an ambition already and fulfilling that commitment will certainly keep us busy,” reasons Faust. “If I continued to talk I’d soon find myself in breach of an NDA, so let’s leave it with three big dots there…”
Drif is out now via Season Of Mist.
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