Interview: Performing Rituals with Heilung
Heilung members Maria Franz and Christopher Juul talk about their new album Drif, enigmatic stage presence, and intricate creative process.
Written by C.S. Harper
Photo courtesy of Season of Mist
Heilung, which means “healing” in German, is just that: a project devoted to healing through music. Beginning as an outlet for frontman Kai Uwe Faust’s poetry, Heilung has grown into an internationally acclaimed three-piece group with viral music videos and features in pop culture phenomena like “Game of Thrones” and “Vikings.”
Fascinated by Heilung’s humanitarian mission and multicultural sound, Print Editor-in-Chief C.S. Harper sat down with two members, Maria Franz and Christopher Juul, to learn more about the band.
Afterglow: You call your work “amplified history.” Can you tell me more about that?
Maria: So because we are drawing inspiration from the roots of especially Nordic history, but we also stretched further south, and we picture ourselves in a situation where we are trying to be sort of a missing link between our past and then our present society.… Because if we wanted to do a prehistoric ritual by the books, it would be no … amplification, we would all be standing in a circle in the forest somewhere, and there would definitely not be enough audio to be able to be heard without a small circle of maybe a maximum of 50, 100 people. So if we want to reach out to a broader audience, we need, of course, amplification. Putting electricity [into] an ancient ritual was scary in the beginning because it's kind of contradictory. We're able to give people a feeling that they are a part of something prehistoric, something that is older than ourselves. And many people talk about feeling their roots although no matter where they come from in the world, they have this grounded connectedness with their pasts. It's very interesting to work with.
Something that attracted me to your work is the visuals, particularly the historically accurate costumes. Can you tell me more about the process of creating them?
Maria: So what we did and what we do is that we ask everyone in the group to picture themselves in a modern-day society, but with [the places] they draw inspirations from [and] where they feel connected to. So for instance, one of our singers is from Paris, and she feels connected to France. She chose an outfit which lies, I think like 500 years back in time. She Googled and did some research, and she found the dress that really spoke to her and she recreated it, but with the amplifications of modern time, with sewing machines, and buttons, it's modernized for modern time on stage.
But for me personally, the dress I'm wearing, I made it when I was 16. It's this really, really soft and beautiful, lovely to wear linen dress. And you know, I've been wearing it so much. It's completely like flower petals, the softness to it is so nice. And when we began the project, I just had this vision that I had to be in very light clothes. And I had to have these fringes on my arms that gave me like a weightlessness, like feathers and hair, something that would make me feel less connected to the ground. And yeah, picture antlers on my head and the fringes before the eyes. The fringes in front of the eyes is an ancient shamanistic tradition of letting you see the world but not letting the evil spirits see you. You can say that, for me, the inspiration is drawn on both my love and fascination for my Viking history roots. But I also somehow always also had been drawn to the nomadic culture of the Siberian people and their music traditions. So yeah, it's just what feels intuitively right, I would say.
The same goes for Kai and Christopher [in] that they also are wearing a mixture between their old Viking clothes, and Kai has a whole spiritual regalia — we don't actually call it costumes because it's more than that in a way. Of course, it becomes very personal. So everyone has bits and pieces of themselves, amulets — I have seashells from my childhood beach, I have, you know, gifts from friends and family woven into it, horsehair, much of it is from strings from bows from violins. So it's like music is also woven into the outfit in a way. And it continues to develop as well … It keeps growing with the project.
What cultures influenced Drif, and how did you do your research for the album?
Maria: Kai has a huge library of ancient texts from all over the world and it's stuff that has been written in between the lines of church books on Iceland — it’s ancient spells, the ancient sagas, and basically everything ancient is in that library. And there have been different threads along the different albums about where to go, like for instance, in Ofnir, we had the focus on masculinity. It was songs about war and strings, and more like — I wouldn't call it aggressive — but Odin is the big character that we sing our hymn to in that one. And then Futha had a more feminine energy.
And then in Drif, we had a very clear vision when we started writing for it, that it would be like a two-part album. We had a plan, but during the process, the album just wanted to do something else. Every time we tried to dictate which path to go, it was kind of like we were like, steered back to, “No, you should work on this space. And that fits with this space.” And so somehow, it ended up being a flock of pieces from all over. And I was very fascinated to work with ancient Roman stuff because we have a lot of knowledge from what they were doing. In the Roman age, there were many inscriptions, we know about their religion and the language, [but] nothing about pronunciation so that you just have to kind of do what feels right. And it has been very enriching to work with the Eastern parts, because we know that our ancestors loved to travel and that they loved to be inspired by the places they were visiting. So I think it's inspirational to embrace and show love and fascination for the different cultures around you.
Photo courtesy of Tom Delgado
What was the creative process like for “Tenet,” which is a 13-minute-long epic in Drif?
Christopher: So the concept around it is around the Sator square, right? That, among other places, has been found in Pompeii, but actually, there's versions of it found all the way up to the north in ancient times. What is interesting about this square is that it's a four-sided palindrome. So it reads the same in four different directions. So, when we started writing the music, we [created]] an algorithm around the actual Sator square that would go into a sort of code language where we would go in and find tonalities that we know would have been present back then in different cultures. From there, we managed to create melodies that place the same backward and forward as the Sator square, but as the Sator square itself also is a four-way, we also do stuff in the actual production where it mirrors itself both back and forward in the spectrum of the sound. And funny enough, like when we put it out, I don't think it took more than you know, half an hour before someone started playing it backwards.
With how intricate your music is, what is the live experience of Heilung like?
Christopher: It’s like “Tenet;” a very complex structure. It combines many efforts of different elements that go hand-in-hand, right? So we have the old spiritual element that is embodying all of Heilung in what we're doing. And then we have the historical aspects. And then we have, of course, the technique that has to underlie making the whole performance amplified, basically. So getting it to a point where — the best techniques and the best technology you can have is invisible technology. As soon as you start thinking, “There is a lamp hanging somewhere, wow, what a lamp!” then you actually failed your mission, right? Because you want to be fully immersed. We're not portraying a picture for you… we are not pretending who we are here. We are enlarging and amplifying who we are in this. And in that way, all the techniques and cables and lamps from these amazingly talented people that work around the stage and in front and under and all that — it's kind of an invisible work. Of course, it's amazing to look at and all that, but it should feel like one unit.
Maria: And even before the music starts, we follow an ancient recipe for what a ritual should contain, which is that you start by smudging the stage with incense, and everyone on the stage, and inviting the benevolent spirits to join us. And then also smudging the audience, inviting them to join the circle. The music contains many of the same elements: you have a sacrifice, you have a war chant, you have a love spell, you have a death spell, and then we finish off with a completely trancing out piece, and then we’re closing the ritual down with a closing ceremony where we all also stand in a circle holding hands, getting smudged by incense, closing the circle, inviting the spirits — we’re releasing the energies again.
Christopher: One of the functions we use to create these things — it’s very apparent in the first live recording that can still be seen online that’s called Lifa — but it still also follows into the new storyline we’re doing, and that is we are mimicking real things anyone can relate to. The show is built like a full day, so it starts at sunrise, and it ends at sundown, basically, and that goes through the color scheme of the live visual that you see throughout the show. We start out by playing what would be an average human heartbeat to align the audience with us, and then we can start to slowly elevate and put it down. It does actually work — it doesn’t matter how many people in the audience there are — everyone will start screaming loudly in the beginning, but as soon as we have aligned everyone — it takes around six minutes to do so — we can actually slow people’s heart down a little bit collectively, and that makes everyone calm so that we can start the ritual correctly. It’s one of the reasons why we cannot just put another piece in the beginning … There is a purpose to everything you hear and feel, and we really mean it when we say we try to alter your state of mind in what we do.
Anything else y’all wanted to add?
Christopher: We usually plant one tree per person that arrives at our rituals as a little gift back to nature, but normally we do it via established companies. But as a unique thing for this tour, we are inviting the audience in to help us decide where we should plant these trees. Imagine when there’s a forest of people in front of the stage, that forest of people will become a real forest, always when we are playing. And this time, we would [also like]to create a little more awareness of it, so it’s not just this invisible thing, “Where did they plant?” and all that. Actually, we want to encourage our friends in the audience to help us if there are any Indigenous residents that had a forest fire recently that need some re-establishment, if there is any land we need to protect, whatever, right? It’s very important to state that what we are doing here is not politically motivated. We’re not going to go out and do political work, but we like trees. And, you know, we kind of need all of them to breathe, all of us here.
I commend you on giving back to communities in this way!
Christopher: If our purpose is to do healing music, it doesn’t work if we are polluting the planet by doing so, so we need to give a little bit back.