Nov. 7, 2023
Words: Slade Rand
Photos: Jon Angel
Heilung and a few thousand congregants shook the ground beneath them at Mission Ballroom during the group’s latest ritual in Denver on Sunday night.
The German collection of folk metal mystics leans into natural, organic imagery during the two-hour ceremony it’s toured worldwide since 2017. Members rely mostly on their voices, calling to ancient times and places where nomadic people would gather in wooded darkness to connect spiritually. Cloaked drummers bang massive handmade instruments, and warriors thrust spears and shields toward the sky in chant at times.
Kai Uwe Faust, the group’s shaman, leads the show in a flowing black robe with his head framed by leafy branches matching those dressing the stage. His partner Maria Franz is draped in all white and red, with antlers stretching to the sky on top of her head.
The duo exchanges leading vocal roles and moves the ceremony forward, inspiring the crowd to shout back at times and the musicians onstage to organically pulse louder.
English or other phrases sometimes emerge from guttural noise onstage, but the art is decidedly multicultural. It reflects a global blend of ideas and sounds. Nearly two dozen members chant, sing and act out the theatrical ritual Heilung brings to its live shows.
Heilung attendees nearly (but politely) overwhelmed venue entry Sunday, lining up three hours before doors and patiently pouring in until a German voice over the P.A. announced at 8:15 p.m. the show would be delayed until everyone was inside.
Bird songs and water noises played before the show while fans wearing horns, fur and facepaint gathered close to the stage and shouted sporadically to the sky. Energy built as the floor audience became a shoulder-to-shoulder mass of black.
Trees and handmade drums onstage encircled nearly a dozen microphones mounted on antlers under a yellow haze.
David Lusk, a veteran and Green Beret with tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he learned of Heilung through a friend and has traveled to Asheville and Denver to see them since. His father was a Baptist, and now Lusk practices a different kind of Germanic Paganism. In his eyes, it’s not about where you grew up – we all come from the same place.
Lusk said Heilung’s music is “very grounded,” and to him represents lots of the core truths of religions or cultures he’s seen practiced all over the world.
“This is a ritual, brother,” Lusk said. “An initiation into this world.”
Lusk said looking up videos of early Heilung shows from five years ago will show you the group puts on essentially the same performance – giving attendees a honed-in ritualistic experience.
Some things were different this time in Denver – including the community of local tribal groups invited to perform the ceremony that starts the show.
Nizhoni Ellenwood, a member of Nezperce and Apache nations, has coordinated local tribes’ participation in Heilung shows since 2019. She said the group tries to involve native peoples in the areas they perform, and it’s up to her to bring them in.
“I find them based on where we are,” Ellenwood said Sunday night.
Ellenwood co-founded the Indigenous Arts Coalition in 2008 as a group for young indigenous emerging artists based out of the San Francisco Art Institute. According to Ellenwood, the IAC is now one of the few art collectives for indigenous peoples in the Bay Area.
Ellenwood and a group of native people began the show with a ceremony making the space sacred, filling the room with smells and rhythms. Heilung then entered one by one flanked by tribal members continuing their ceremony.
Heilung began its show with a lone drum beat center stage as the band circled around its shaman in black.
“Remember, that we are all brothers,” the shaman Kai Uwe Faust began. “All people, beasts, tree and stone and wind…”
The packed crowd in unison repeated the lines of the opening statement.
“We all descend from the one great being.”
Throaty chanting and rhythmic stomping began and continued through most of the show, providing a backbeat for ethereal vocal solos and wails from other members of Heilung onstage.
At the start of one song, ten shirtless warriors baring shields and spears lined up center stage. They banged their spears on the ground and repeated increasingly riotous chants after Kai Uwe Faust.
Backlit with yellow and orange, the silhouetted warriors looked to be coming out of the darkness itself.
The energy ebbs and flows during a Heilung show, at times with only a few members onstage lit in soft white light against the dark forest backdrop. Kai Uwe Faust sat center stage at one point carrying out careful steps of a ritual involving small bones and other trinkets.
Heilung concludes its tour next month with just one more show at the Shrine Auditorium & Expo Center in Los Angeles. The current tour began in October 2021 with a sold-out ritual at Red Rocks Amphitheater, with notable stops around the globe including the Appollo in London in January 2023. Tickets for Heilung’s Dec. 11 stop in LA and tour are available here along with tour information.
After Midnight 
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