Heilung's "amplified history"

On the medicinal properties of Iron Age music.

Photo by Carrie Zukoski, from Heilung’s November 1 concert at The Factory

The Saenger Theater barely survived Katrina. The basement filled with water; the orchestra pit filled with water; the stage went underwater. It took eight years to restore it. Now it feels old — it was built in 1927 — but also new.

The auditorium mimics a 14th-century Italian Baroque courtyard, with terra-cotta columns, painted plaster, Greek and Roman statues, grottoes, urns, and lots of gilding. The ceiling, like a plantarium, winks with stars. Unlike real stars, you can turn them off and use projections to turn the ceiling into a bank of moving clouds, a sunset, or a sunrise.

A few days before Halloween, Thomas and I sat in the Saenger’s velvety seats, watching those stars flicker overhead, listening to birdsong over the PA. Every seat was filling up, not with your usual fancy theatergoers, but with mall goths and classic goths; Skate Betties; minimalist metal dudes; folks resembling extras from Vikings; and a wide cast of unclassifiables. We were all there to see Heilung.

TCMH, v.96: When Concerts Become an Existential Exercise

Heiling isn’t a “band,” exactly, even though the New York Times described them that way in a profile last year (“The Sound of the Vikings, With a Heavy Metal Twist”). They don’t call their shows “concerts.” They use the word “ritual,” or sometimes “amplified history.”

As the NYT wrote:

Working with a team of researchers and performing on replica instruments from the period, Heilung produces music that its members describe as “amplified history.” Heilung takes its lyrics from historical texts, like runic inscriptions on archaeological finds, and uses sound sources that would have been available to early European civilizations, such as stones, bones and crude metal objects struck together.

“We’re not claiming that we are doing the exact same thing as our ancestors did, because no one knows,” vocalist Maria Franz continued. “But it’s our interpretation of how it might have felt.”

As this Montreal publication noted, members wear “historically accurate costumes made with antlers and animal skins. They are body painted and tattooed with runes. Throughout the performance, there are soundscapes of nature,  water, fire, the howls of animals, the chirping of birds. They play ancient Bronze Age instruments built out of wood, fur, skin, and bones.”

Founder Kai Uwe Faust starts each show with a smoke cleanse; he whistles to call in Austri, Vestri, Norðri and Suðri, the four dwarves that hold up the sky Then the performers — nearly 20 of them — form a circle, and pray:

Remember, that we all are brothers.
All people, beasts, trees and stone and wind.
We all descend from the one great being
that was always there
before people lived and named it
before the first seed sprouted.

Faust used to be a black metal fan, but changed course after a girlfriend exposed him to shamanry, which he says healed a chronic illness — and his nihilism. He started attending Viking re-enactments, where he read poems he’d written about Nordic history. After he recorded those with co-founder Christopher Juul (Franz’s partner) an arts collective began to form, which eventually evolved into Heilung.

Faust says he’s “been into all that Nordic stuff and everything way before it was cool”; maybe since childhood. His hometown stood near “stone circles and caves… that date back to the Stone Age,” he told Metal Hammer. “The area I grew up in was one of the last to convert to Christianity in Germany back in the 8th and 9th century, and it’s close to the so-called ‘Limes’, which was a long cultural border between the Magna Germania and the Roman Empire. I learned about this history of my ancestors and my home at a very young age.”

“Keltentrauer” (“Woe of the Celts”) was released last year. Faust wrote the words 20 years ago; the poem tells the story of the Gauls’ defeat by the Romans. That song is now perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist — Saturday Night Live just lampooned the #ancientrome trend on TikTok. Apparently, American men think about Ancient Rome at least once a day; some lionizing the Praetorian Guard, others taking the side of the Barbarians that clashed with them.

Maybe that’s not such a surprise. Game of Thrones was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s visit to Hadrian’s Wall. Stoicism’s gone mainstream. During the pandemic, Barbarians (which told the story of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest) was the most-watched international series on Netflix.

Heilung means “healing,” in German. One very specific piece of cultural healing it’s dedicated to is debunking fascist/racist appropration of old Europe (as one academic put it, “Dungeons and Dragons for racists.”) Go to the band’s YouTube channel and you’ll see the disclaimer, “Heilung is amplified history from early medieval northern Europe and should not be mistaken for a modern political or religious statement of any kind.”

Wardruna and folk duo Hindarfjäll are in the same camp. So is anthropologist Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, who’s constantly challenging the shoddy, warped scholarship of political extremists (including the same ones who blew a gasket when archaeologists decoded Cheddar Man’s DNA and presented his face to the world.) The producers of Barbarians told the New York Times that one of their motivations for making the show was to wrench back history appropriated by Nazis and German nationalists, purposely casting an actor with dark eyes and hair to rebuke the Aryan stereotype.

“If you are stupid, you are stupid,” Warduna’s founder Einar Selvik said. “It does not matter if you’re descended from any Viking king.”

Rituals, not concerts

What sets Heilung apart from other European folk bands is its theatrical shows, or “rituals.” As theater scholar Christina Grammatikopoulou notes, the roots of theater lie in ritual; the word “tragedy,” means “song of the goats,” referring to a Greek chorus dressed as satyrs.

In fact, Juul describes Heilung’s rituals “theater for the gods.” Like in those ancient Greek rituals, the experience is meant to change you. Again, from the Times’ profile, describing Heiung’s early shows:

“It was a phenomenon,” said Jonathan Selzer, a music journalist at Metal Hammer magazine. He remembered seeing the band at Midgardsblot [music festival], in 2017, when it played the penultimate slot. The set incorporated elaborate costumes, including antlers and animal furs, battle cries and half-naked actors dressed as warriors charging around the stage. This performance set the blueprint for all of Heilung’s stage shows since. “You could just see this realization going through the crowd in real time, from incomprehension to wonder,” Selzer said. “The whole field turned into Viking rave.”

Ritual this, ritual that

According to Grammatikopoulou, the true descendant of ancient Greek theater isn’t stuff like Hello, Dolly, but Dada, Cabaret Voltaire, and works by performance artists like Marina Abramović.

“In performance art, the artist somehow acts like a modern day shaman that introduces the viewers into a mind-altering experience,” she wrote.

You could say the same thing about many of Abramović’s contemporaries outside of the academy, including Klaus Nomi, Lydia Lunch and the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, who often lit half the building on fire or sledgehammered away big parts of the ceiling or floor As Tiny Mix Tapes wrote:

A foundational band in the lineage of industrial music, Neubauten took the burgeoning genre to its most literal extreme, incorporating scrap material, homemade instruments, and power tools into their work.

In 1986, the band toured Japan and worked with cyberpunk director Sogo Ishii to create a film for its album, Halber Mensch. It includes live concert footage, performances inside a crumbling factory, and videos featuring a punk Butoh dance troupe. Watching it now, it feels like a perfect expression of the late Cold War era, in a time of AIDS and the threat of nuclear anhiliation. Young people felt like they had. nothing to lose, which left them free to engage in a lot of wild experimentation that was subversive to its core.

Again, from Tiny Mix Tapes:

Einstürzende Neubauten literally translates to “collapsing new buildings,” but its connotations in German are far more subversive. The Germans use the word neubauten to describe architecture that sprang up in the wake of World War II, versus altbauten, the older (and often sturdier and more beautiful) buildings from the pre-war period. The band’s name, therefore, signifies the implosion of the new order, the collapse of a flimsy myth of progress over a tragic history. Sogo Ishii, meanwhile, came to prominence in the early 80s through a series of guerilla sci-fi films that helped define cyberpunk cinema in Japan. The movement’s Western counterparts — novelists like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and filmmakers like Ridley Scott (with Bladerunner) or Paul Verhoven (with Robocop) — spun futures in which a declining US was being eclipsed by megalithic corporations and an influx of Eastern culture, where scrappy computer hackers pulled noirish capers in virtual realms of ones and zeros that we would later come to know as the internet. Japanese cyberpunk was often more dystopian in vision. In place of sprawling megacities, we have post-industrial wastelands roamed by gangs and outlaws. In place of cybernetic prostheses and implants that blur the distinction between human and machine, we have invasive technologies that corrupt and pervert the human body.

It was defintiely not the time or place for a band like Heilung. The ’60s flamed out hard, and people were still tired of earnest folk-anything. In fact, in 1971, the absurdist band Phileman Arthur & the Dung won the Swedish version of a Grammy, even though its two members have remained completely anonymous to this day.

The old-new-old ways

If the right ritual theater for the Reagan/Thatcher era was goofballs in gnome masks playing radiator percussion, our present moment seems to ask for something more… serious? Deep-rooted? Not nihilistic? Less postmodern? It’s hard to find the right words. But judging from the response to Heilung’s American tour, it looks a lot more like birdsong, warrior choirs and acoustic drumming.

Heilung’s music has the deep, haunted feel that attracts people to metal or goth, but it doesn’t belong to either genre. It’s not about an aesthetic. Every instrument and costume is created for a reason, and has a deep meaning behind it. The experience of a Heilung “ritual” requires something from its audience beyond the price of a ticket. For those who don’t want to put any skin(s) in the game…. well, you can make do with the injection-molded versions of Thor and Loki in the Marvel Universe. But remember: they’re still gods.

“Our world seems devoid of magic, comprised of boring realities that brook no alternatives: from the academic industrial complex to neoliberal capitalism,”anthropologist Michael Taussig once wrote. “The hegemonic mode of thinking which makes us think that way, is perhaps the most magical and insidious form of sorcery there is.”

Heilung has one date left on its Amplified History tour: December 11, in Los Angeles. If you are there, or can get there, I’d say: go!