“I’m into all that Nordic stuff and everything way before it was cool,” says singer Kai Uwe Faust of Heilung. “I was always an outsider. You know, ‘Oh Kai, he’s playing Vikings, and he’s already 30!’ But now, suddenly, it became cool, and I’m permanently puzzled. I’m still permanently puzzled. How could that happen?”
Music with an old Norse twist has existed as a genre within metal going back to the beginnings of hard rock. Like the stories and mythology of that time, music reminiscent of Northern Europe in the days of old keeps finding audiences today. Within the last decade, however, Viking-inspired art has expanded into film, television, and literature.
Over the years, Heilung have been instrumental in bringing this style of music into the mainstream. Kai Uwe Faust, Christopher Juul, and Maria Franz formed Heilung in 2014. On Ofnir and Futha, Heilung created Viking folk metal through counterbalanced vocals and heavy use of percussions to create the feeling of a ritualistic ceremony. On record and in their theatrical live shows, Heilung create music from a variety of sources underutilized in music.
“Sometimes it’s birds giving us the melody,” says Faust. “The fire itself can give us melody.”
Drif is the newest album from Heilung, out through Season of Mist. While Ofnir was a masculine album, and Futha was a feminine album, the concept of Drif is “throng.”
“Every song is like a short story that could more or less stand for itself,” says Kai Uwe Faust. “Every song is very individual, but still ‘gathering’ in that ‘throng’ thing. If they were a person, they would be like a gathering of individuals that get on some level together, that have some kind of harmony on a certain level going on. Each song leads to a different place, or it could be a different path.”
What makes Drif unique from what Heilung have previously done is how it also explores music in other historical periods. On Drif, there is a song that was sung by the Roman army and a Bronze Age song carved in tablets from Ugarit. Like the snake biting its tail in the ouroboros, Heilung have made it seem like the past is coming from the future.
“There is no culture that popped up isolated, had an isolated life, and disappeared again,” says Faust. “If we stick to the Vikings, they travelled all around the known world at the time, and they brought everything home, from glass beads to technology to even fashion. We can trace their travels down to the Middle East from Scandinavia, from Sweden. There’s an old Norse word for Jerusalem. So, they knew what was going on in the Mediterranean. Then, when they returned home, suddenly they started wearing these super fluffy pants that are fashionable in Arabia at the time. They just imported it to North.”
Faust reflects that then, just as now, cultures were influenced by one another. “We know, for example, that the rulers in the Middle East, that they were, in the Viking Age, crazy about the white falcons that you don’t find down there. They had to be imported from Scandinavia, right? There was always a connection.”
On Drif, Heilung expand their sound to include different instruments. “On ‘Anoana,’ we also introduce the instrument that we haven’t introduced before, the jouhikko,” says Faust. “It’s a traditional Finnish instrument, and the general style of the instrument is very typical in early medieval.”
While the present is always projected into history when looking back on it, Heilung suspend modern understandings of certain concepts when looking to the past. “Asja,” for instance, is a love song, even though (it) does not sound like a love song today. That’s because the concepts of love expressed by Heilung are different from the love artists describe in music today.
“There are different concepts of love,” says Faust. “When I say love, I could either mean like (a) relationship and something more erotic, but it could also be the love you have (in a) family relationship or even the love of god. Love is a very multi-layered concept.”
Faust also draws from his own experience working with shamans in “Asja.” He says, “I work a lot with shamanism, and whenever I meet very, very strong shamans, they always have that signature of deep, deep love to creation and to people. That also is the source of all their healing power, that devotion to love, to well-being, to meet someone and really wanting that person to do good from the center of your soul, I think that is more where ‘Asja’ is born.”
“Asja” was also influenced by the Hávamál, an epic poetic text from the Viking age full of life lessons and revelations.
“The Hávamál of course is also something very complex and very multi-layered,” says Faust. “It has a lot of words that still fits our everyday life today, and it also has, of course, a lot of magic words, a lot of abstract words. For me, the Hávamál, for more than 25 years, is like a guideline. Very often, when I’m in trouble, you know, or in ‘big bubbles no troubles,’ the Hávamál is very often something where I go back to where I really find inspiration or kind of an angle for a solution or reassurance. I’m responsible for the songwriting, and I want to pass that on for people.”
It took Heilung a long time to make Drif. “When we started out, we had a different thought (of) how it would look in the end,” says Faust. “For Drif, we spent 200 days in the studio. That’s what makes the difference to a lot of other things. Artists are in a studio for a week or two. We’re in there all the time. That’s the good thing when you have the producer as a band member. That’s quite a luxury!”
Each individual member of Heilung contributes to the band’s vision collectively. “We have very clear roles in how we do it and what do,” says Faust. “It usually starts with me giving the initial impulse, giving the topic, coming with the lyrics that are either from an older source or from myself. Then, we sit together, and we talk, and I introduce the two of them to the topic, and most of the time, they know what it is about because they live in the same world like in reenactment and all this. We dive in it and very often it is that it results at a point where I get the request to recite the lyrics just more or less plain, just read it out or recite it. That is already very often Christopher coming in from there and having this perfect musical ear. The syllables that I stress, he can perfectly translate into notes.”
In addition to reconstructing music from history in the present, members of Heilung also adapt art from their personal pasts. “Keltentrauer” is based on a poem Faust wrote almost 20 years ago. “I was writing that poem in a time when I was living at a place where there were actual combat Celtic tribes and the Romans,” says Faust. “I went out of my door, and 100 meters away from there were old Roman army barracks.”
In this period before his life in Heilung, Faust was deeply involved with Viking reenactment and theater performances where he read his poems. The poems Faust wrote also explain how Heilung began.
“At that time already, I was part of a super-tiny, Viking, old-style reenactment theater group we had,” says Faust. “We performed very basic, no microphone, like in the old days, 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, how people would play theater. For that, I was providing the lyrics, and the funny (thing) is, I’ve performed it on small stages on castles and Medieval fairs, but then I moved to Denmark in 2010.
“After a while, people were like, ‘Kai we miss you and everything. Your poems around the campfire are not there anymore. Can’t you just record them and give them to us?’ My family was missing me. Then I was like, ‘OK, I know that guy, he’s a producer; he probably can record me.’ That is when I walked up to Christopher and said, ‘Hey, Christopher. Can you record a couple poems for me? I’ll make two for you, and then I can send that to family.’ Then we started, and out of it came Heilung.”
Adapting poetry from Faust’s past is now a Heilung ritual with each new album. Faust says, “In the beginning, I just wanted to talk my poems out as I usually do and happen to have that on a CD, send that to Germany, and that’s it. We recorded one poem, and then, he also wanted to know if I sing something. I wanted to do no-singing stuff like I usually do in the rituals and everything, not thinking about how that could be worth anything. It was just playing around, being very easy, being very much as a child. Out of these poems, Heilung grew. That is why we still have the tradition that whenever we do a new album, we take one of my old poems that I originally just wanted to quickly record, and incorporate it in the format. You can see it evolving more and more.”
Heilung’s music addresses a broad spectrum of human experiences, including the dark and shadowy aspects of life.
“What we do is describe stuff which is very dark,” says Faust. “When you’re just into light and just into heaven, then you completely lose the roots. As they say in Eastern Buddhism and stuff like that, the lotus is rooted in the swamp. It roots into something really, really dark, really, really rotting, really, really nasty, and then it goes through water and there is the blossom and the light, the blossom that cannot be touched by anything. All shit and even super glue just pearls off. That is the whole being. So, for me, for us it’s important to transport that, yes, that darkness, that shameful, that disgraceful thing, or whatever, is part of you. You cannot reject it, you cannot cut it off.”
Reframing darkness in a ritualistic way allows for the music of Heilung to have healing properties. “I like Alan Watts how he describes it,” Faust says, “That also links in my head back to a very, very ancient mindset, that the whole planet and everything that is, is just one big intelligent being that has dark sides and shadowy sides that are always fighting with the light and vice versa.”
When it comes to Heilung’s future as a band, Faust emphasizes that having fun while making music is imperative.
“Must be fun,” Faust says. “That’s the most important thing.”
Watch the video for “Anoana” here:
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Photo courtesy of Andy Julia
