Heilung connects to the earth before their latest tour

Heilung. // photo courtesy the artist

To describe the Nordic collective Heilung as a band is too reductive by half. The group was founded in 2014, and it wasn’t until 2016 that the collective played their first show. As their label, Season of Mist, puts it, they don’t so much make music as amplify history, drawing from Nordic tales going all the way back to the age of the Vikings. It’s “theater for the gods,” says Danish producer Christopher Juul, who co-founded the group with German vocalist Kai Uwe Faust.

The core trio is rounded out by the other vocalist, Maria Franz, and with a touring retinue of nearly a dozen and a half other members, the experience of seeing Heilung live is not so much a concert as a theatrical experience whose intention is to transport you to another place and time, courtesy of period-correct attire and sounds for a ritual which is as visual as it is sonic. It’s folk since it’s music for the people, but those expecting gentle melodies and some folks in flannel and gingham will be sorely disappointed, if not outright frightened.

Heilung comes to the Midland for their first-ever Kansas City appearance this Friday, November 3, and ahead of their stop, we spoke with Christopher Juul and Maria Franz about the band’s aesthetic and history.

The Pitch: One fascinating thing about your live performance is that you were a band for almost two years before you ever played your first live show. Was that trying to figure out how you sound to how you look?

Maria Fraanz: No, not at all. It was never meant to go live. This was a studio project. One of the perfect examples of that is that we didn’t plan breathing breaks in the vocal parts of any of our music for the first time because it was just a fun experimental project between good friends who had some good ideas in the studio. We self-released it, and then, yeah, other friends in our scene picked up on it and started to say, “Oh, you have to take this live,” which was Castlefest in Holland and Midgardsblot in Norway. These two festivals both reached out and said, “Guys, you have to bring this to the stage,” and we refused for a long time.

Christopher Juul: Yeah. But you know, we have done many projects before, obviously, so when we first got over the idea of breathing pauses not being a thing, we started building it, and from there, we were fairly confident on where to go with it. The show you can see on YouTube, which is still our primary live recording, is actually the first show we ever did, and that took a year to prepare more or less. Aside from the breathing pauses and things like that, what were the challenges to taking something that you had never really had visual consideration for and bringing it to life?

Juul: There are many elements of it when you produce it. What we do is, of course, a more ritual than a concert, but the mechanics behind it is we are producing it as a theater performance. We call it a theater for the gods. There’s the light, and there are all the stage things.

Franz: A fireplace. How would you bring that to a stage?

Juul: A waterfall. A lot of the sound, too, is nature sounds. There’s a limit to how much nature we can bring onto the stage, obviously, and also, it’s about a focus point. Of course, we could bring 50 people that stand with machines and do stuff, but what is the story we want to tell here? We went with the core principle of what the projects already were, and that is amplifying history, so we brought ourselves and what we were already doing offstage with us to the stage, and we amplified it—draw on what you already know and also what is true here, right? We are not dressing up for this. We are taking the clothes on, so to say, and of course, it gets more spectacular with the lights and the show. For instance, our shamanic worker, Kai, brought his shamanic code that he’d used for rituals for years before that. We brought a piece of ourselves, and then we amplified it.

What kind of research do you all do to make sure that the historically accurate aspects of this really bring the history to people in a true way?

Juul: A lot of what we do is based in science and stuff like that, even though we do not directly mingle in the debate. What we do is also, to a certain degree, in our project—and we don’t claim to be 100% authentic–but we bring authentic material to the table. We don’t want to dictate to you how it was, but we want to make you smell it. We want to make you hear it and feel how it might have been, but there is an immense amount of research in what we do. Everything we do comes from a historical context or is directly inspired by it, and a lot of the lyrics you hear and the words we are singing come from actual sources such as inscriptions on rune staffs and rune stones and a lot from the poetic editors and stuff like that.

Do you find yourselves going to libraries, museums, things like that to see this stuff in person rather than just looking things up online?

Franz: Yeah, absolutely. Museums are a huge source of inspiration for us, and we have several archaeologists connected to our group, which brings valuable insights. Kai, the third core member of Heilung—who unfortunately can’t be here today because he is camping and doesn’t have a connection—has a huge, huge library of scripts and books on the topic of ancient Nordic spirituality. Kai is also a professional tattoo artist with a specialty in Nordic designs. His library is massive and an endless source of inspiration for him for new material.

Juul: I’m just going to turn the camera for a moment. We’re sitting in my studio here, and that is our hub for where we create Heilung. This is where we draw the artwork. This is where we record the sounds that are not recorded out there. Obviously we haven’t set up for that. This is where we basically create everything on the spot. Everything we do is made in-house. It’s very rare that we have collaborators. We did a little bit of collaboration, of course, but most of what you see, what we do comes from here, and so, it becomes this place. We also have a lot of literature here to draw from and people visiting and helping us with figuring out the source material.

Is camping at this point a chance for you all to recharge and get ready for that experience of being on the road and all it is?

Juul: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it has to make sense, right? If you are only a group of pagans that are driving around on wheels, you don’t really get to connect to the land, right? You want free-range shamanic workers to do healing rituals, right? Otherwise, it doesn’t really work. It is about connection and getting connected to the land that you are in and having real grass under your feet.

Franz: It’s also a reason why we don’t play back-to-back. We never perform rituals day after day because we need that day in between. It’s a very demanding performance. All of us give everything, and we do it with great joy and great pleasure, but it does drain you. It’s weird because, after the ritual, we were all very high in our spirits. And we always end up almost always end up dancing or playing games and having a good time. And then we get the nightliners to stop somewhere at an RV park, and we can just go hiking and eat some good food. And then we’re ready again. We don’t stay inside cities in hotels too much.

Juul: No, not too much. And you have a beautiful country. You have so many beautiful places. I actually want to say one thing about that also. And that is why we are, historically speaking, always donating a little bit from each ticket sold to plant trees. That is something that is very much needed in your country. We are still open to suggestions from your readers that if you know a nice place that needs some trees—look at it like this. The forest of people in front of the stage will become a real forest because every person who attends the ritual will become one seat that we plant a tree for, so we hope they will come with some suggestions.

Heilung plays The Midland on Friday, November 3. Details on that show here.