Heilung On Creating Amplified History In Australia

HEILUNG, the ground-breaking collective renowned for their captivating performances, kick off their highly anticipated rituals across Australia and New Zealand at the end of next month. This marks the debut of their mesmerizing rituals in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Auckland and their return to Sydney and Melbourne.

Since its inception in 2015, the enigmatic ritual collective has been paving melodic paths to the past with their unique and mystifying sound. Evading conventional genres and defying labels, the group self-describe their sound as “amplified history,” emphasizing their ability to connect with modern audiences with the rudiments of humanity’s beginnings through music.

HEILUNG’S rituals are captivating and enthralling, with their unique fusion of ancient traditions and modern innovation, transporting audiences into a realm of primal energy and mysticism, invoking the spirits of ancestors through haunting vocals and featuring authentic traditional instrumentation that ranges from rattles and ritual bells to human bones and throat singing.

These rituals will be an opportunity for fans to immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of Nordic culture and witness firsthand the power of HEILUNG. Maria, Kai and Christopher talk to HI Fi Way about the tour and what fans can expect to experience.

Are you excited for your massive Australian tour which isn’t far away now?
Maria: Yeah, we’re super excited about it. We feel very welcomed also by our audience buying tickets and the media reaching out. We’re looking forward it.

For Australian music lovers who might not know much about Heilung, how would you describe your music?
Maria: Free Christian Pagan ritual.

Kai: Prehistoric techno, yeah!

Christopher: We choose to call it amplified history, so the concept of what we’re doing is not trying to recreate one hundred percent how it might have been but more like how it might have been feeling. We do this by amplifying certain elements from this time and age and put it into modern production.
Maria: We also sometimes say it’s a theatre production disguised as a rock concert, which we don’t play rock, but the production is quite big now, the visual and the aesthetics of it is also worth mentioning for people to experience.

A Heilung concert is a not a typical experience, what do you hope people take away from the experience?
Christopher: Well, we operate out of an idea that that we aim to alter the state of mind and we do this by playing with all your senses, you will see something spectacular. You’re going to feel something quite powerful in terms and you will also smell the incense. We tried to create an arc for you when you arrive at the venue and to your exit.

Maria: So, hopefully you leave a Heilung ritual feeling in a better state of mind than when you entered. You go through a whole washing machine of emotions and then we gently let you go into the world again, hopefully feeling better.

How much rehearsal goes into like a production like this because it almost seems like there’s not a lot of room for error?
Kai: I can only talk for of course myself. When you see us performing our rituals live, there will always be at least nine people that are just wearing trousers and come in with spears and shields who do a lot of shouting. These guys are taken out of a group of forty and then the ones that are living closest to the area where we’re playing, they’re joining the performance. All of them need to train at home so they know what is going on and they’re safe in the lyrics, they’re safe in the choreography because it’s a group choreography where everyone at any given point needs to know where the other one is. Then on performance day, we have two hours of training and warm up. That is the only way in my opinion, you can perform something that is so extensive.

Christopher: The whole production has months and months of preparation, it’s a big team, not only for what you see on stage, but also what you see of course behind stage. There is an equal amount of people on stage and behind the stage to make this show happen.

Is there much scope to improvise a little bit? Or is it sticking to the script and making things work like a well machine?
Christopher: Well, it’s a combination, we create pockets for where we can breathe basically. So yes, a Heilung show is a living organism, it is controlled chaos in some way, but we aim to make every performance unique.

Maria: There is a lot of set choreography and I like to think of it like I said for a few years back that the definition of a ritual is a theatre for the gods and you basically put together a lot of elements that are fixed in the in the frame where the aim is to please our gods and communicate with our spirits. This is the framework of Heilung as well.

How much research goes in to the production and making as close as you can to the time period?
Kai: Literally decades, all of three of started doing reenactment. Maria, started at the age of eleven or something like that. That is the point where she started picking up all the old techniques of how people were doing clothing in the late Iron Age and Christopher, you were playing piano before you could walk! Heilung is more or less a flower of a very deep grown plant that basically started already when we were children.

Maria: It’s a fascinating theme actually, because we always ask new members joining the group to dig in to their own history and their own roots and what would make them feel connected to their past. So, we don’t dictate what people are wearing on stage at all, but we give the freedom to interpret their own history and wear what makes you feel connected to your roots and comfortable to move around on stage.

Has there been anything about the research that you’ve done, going way back in time that made you go, wow, I never really knew that before?
Christopher: There’s quite a few examples. Most of this stuff happens in in the songwriting process when we are making albums, so it’s usually Kai coming with source material for us to work with on a compository level. One of them, one of my favourites, is one we did from the Roman era where we received from Kai a Sasso Square that is a palindrome that can be read in four different directions. We had to try to create a song that could do the same and after two years of work we ended up with a song that can play the same forward and backward, which was kind of interesting.

How does the creative process work for Heilung?
Kai: When we’re approaching a new a new album like we go song by song because it makes the most sense. We’re all creative minds, I always try to present the whole thing as like Lego bricks that you can assemble in different ways. That gives in the end, the producing element, the freedom to arrange it as it seems fit or as it feels fit. I read a lot about ancient poetry, ancient songs, ancient ritual texts and when I have the feeling or I dream about it, or in my meditations, there is something that is clearly showing itself, something that that is coming up in an interesting way then I clean write it so to say because sometimes when you read the translation from an ancient Egyptian text, for example, it has very weird letters. If I showed it like that, for example, to Maria she wouldn’t know how to pronounce that very particular phonetic letter. I go into this phonetic alphabet and then write it in a readable way for the three of us. When that is done, sometimes it doesn’t need to be done in Latin for example, we have all the letters that we know and when that is done, I give it away and then my child is born. Then I take a step back and I like to read it to them and then I wait for rhythms or melodies or compositions that are coming up out of out of that seed. Then we take it from there.

Christopher: The creative process for Heilung is a very closed space in our studio in Copenhagen. It needs to be that while our live shows is a very outwards concept where we are out and visiting everyone, when we when we create the core material we are alone together.

How do deal with differences of opinion with the music that you’re that you’re shaping?
Maria: It’s cool to just be the three of us in the creative process. Normally if two of us agree the third will go OK and run with it. We’re all born in October, we’re all sometimes a little bit on the fence with where to go but helps when the three of us come to the same conclusion which will benefit the process. I don’t think we’ve ever had like an artistic difference of opinion. There was one point with the last album where we wanted it to be a double album, but the album simply didn’t want that. We let the artistic process more or less take the lead and which songs come out of it.

Christopher: Art can be, as Maria says, its own entity in a way. You can either choose as the artist to try and control it and direct it in a certain direction, but sometimes it just has its opinion on its own. What I would say also in the creative process, none of us really are overlapping in roles in what we’re doing and works really well. When we extend it to the live performance, we are listening to inputs from our band mates on how to extend this even further on a stage. Also the choreography is not only a sound project but is a visual project where we see Kai’s drawings in books when we are when we are releasing, and all this is usually made in the same space so it feels coherent.

Is it mostly the history and the time period that influences the music or do you get inspiration from other artists and bands?
Kai: I think that is something we consciously try to avoid. I honestly can say I am very ignorant towards the musical niche where we are existing. If we would listen to all this Nordic shamanic music, at some point we would pick it up and have similar melodies, similar vibes and stuff. As an artist, I was consciously avoiding reading through magazines and going to other artists website. Whenever I was looking for inspiration I went to my history books, I went to my 1920 art books, all that kind of stuff and I think that was one of the reasons why I was so successful. I’m not listening to this and that song and thinking we need to make a song like that band. They might have had forty million plays but I’m coming up with something which I personally think is really, really difficult to do and maybe impossible. I just throw the idea on the board and I watch it either grow or not.

Christopher: The way we create wouldn’t really allow for such influences from other brands as we are creating it from the source material with the three of us interpreting it ourselves with how we want to tell the story. right. There’s not really room to start that off by listening to other songs.

Are there plans for new music at some stage?
Kai: We were just talking about something very interesting, but I don’t think we share it.

Maria: No, I think it’s a secret. But we can say that we’re constantly working on new music because we’re constantly coming across new cool findings and inscriptions that are inspiring. We have a lot of stuff already lying in the studio and as Christopher famously now has quoted, we will release new music at any point within the next five minutes or three years.

What do you look forward to most about visiting Australia?
Kai: The spiders, snakes, scorpions and the deadly sharks.

Maria: We felt very welcome last time, very much at home and it feels like we’re sharing some common interests and it’s very cool to find that when you travel so far.

Christopher: I look personally forward to meeting the local people of the land, the first nations people and we are planning to have them join us.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Heilung on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…