Heilung: "Occasionally Angry Folk Music... With Antlers"

There's plenty of radio-friendly music I do enjoy, which I am sure some people will find surprising. But the stuff I enjoy the most seems to lie on the outskirts, the fringes - juxtapositions of styles and other musical "edge cases," as it were. One great example is the combination of American blues and Tuvan throat singing demonstrated by Paul Peña in the amazing documentary Genghis Blues, but there are others.

A lot of the power metal I often listen to comes from Finland and other locales of northern Europe. Much of it has a significant amount of thematic overlap with Viking history or Norse mythology, whether directly like Tyr or Turisas incidentally like Stratovarius or Nightwish. I probably shouldn't have been surprised to see a concert video by an experimental folk band popping up on autoplay one day, but I kind of was.

You hear birdsong playing on a foggy stage, as a man adorned in furs comes and blows a deep, sustained note on what appears to be a massive ox horn. As various percussion instruments join in, you can see that many of the mic stands, and many of the performers, are decorated with antlers, bones, skulls or horns of some fashion. A round shield of the Norse style rests on one of the monitor speakers on stage.

The musicians thump on hide drums with strikers made from antler, and a keyboard can be glimpsed amongst all the stage dressing. Periodically you can hear what sounds like a hammer striking an anvil while the female vocalist is striking what appears to be two slender bones together in time to the asynchronous yet compelling rhythm. She begins to sing words in another language, in a high, clear and haunting tone.

And despite the fact that the preceding two paragraphs sound like colour text from a D&D module, I was hooked.

Seriously, look at that concert - when I was a kid all the parents were afraid of cults, recruiting kids at hostels, at drop-in centers, and of course, at concerts.

Dad, to Mom: Fine, Doris, fine, if you want me to embarrass the boy, I will go to that concert, and I will check it out with my own two eyes, but I am telling you that band is not a front for a cult!

 

CUT TO: Dad standing, slack jawed, watching a bunch of foreign nationals wearing and making music with various dead things while chanting and throat singing.)

 

Dad, to Son: C'mon son, I gotta get you outta here - these people are cultists...

(What is it about German artists recognizing the visceral thrill of stark terror when it is skillfully applied to stagecraft? Rammstein, what hast thou done?)

Heilung (whose name is German for "healing") does not refer to their music as experimental folk, but rather as "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe." It's fascinating stuff, and both Fenya and I have fallen for the band in a big way. They are musically alluring and their presentation is beyond intriguing. 

We recently discovered Heilung had released a new video in April called Norupo; this one features the three principals from the band within a circle of standing stones. That's it - there is no story, no plot per se, and no drama to speak of, but it is still intriguing enough o watch, and beautifully shot. Despite the lack of tension, the video still manages to feel dangerous or elicit, like you have stumbled across these individuals in a forest someplace and are torn between wondering what they are up and feeling like an intruder yourself.

Norupo takes its name from the Norse Rune Poem, the source of the runic alphabet we now know as the Elder Futhark. Heilung uses these runes for the credits in their video, which is both fun and highly stylistic, as well as highly reminiscent of the appendices to The Lord of the Rings.

Most surprisingly, I was able to make out most of the first line without needing to use a key or decoder ring - you can see "Heilung," followed by the three primary members of the band: Christopher Juul, Kai Uwe Faust and Maria Franz. I can also make out the word "media" on the next line there, but stopped because my children found my runic knowledge a bit offputting.

Some of the comments under the new video underscore a lot of what I find both fascinating and challenging about the band.

this band is so metal they don't even need electric instruments!

Everyone: what sort of music do you like?

Me: uhhhh ...

Me: "hmmmmmm, what's this glorious sound?"

3 minutes into song: "We will carry the ships over the mountain, dump them into the river, and that is how we will raid Paris.

 

Some of Heilung's music is less folksy and more chant-y, more... atavistic, maybe. No, not maybe - definitely; the track Hakkerskaldyr sounds similar to the Maori Hakka. There is a fan-made lyric video, and you don't need to speak old Norse to know from listening to this that someone's a-gonna get hurt real bad:

Being able to stream full albums of stuff like this through Google music is really liberating. I'm not sure if I need any Heilung CDs in the collection yet, but the band was definitely a part of my inspiration for backing a recent Kickstarter. It's for a co-op narrative Viking survival horror game called Hel: The Last Saga. The imagery is astonishingly close without one being derivative of the other.

Ancient, mysterious, compelling, and otherworldly, in some ways Heilung reminds me of Lisa Gerrard's former group, Dead Can Dance. Their music scratches a lot of the same yearnings and itches, and there is really not a whole lot out there that is like it.

My intrigue for Heilung is far enough along at this point that I would definitely go to see them in concert if the opportunity presented itself. I've already told Fenya though, the second someone brings any livestock up onto stage, we are out of there.