New HEILUNG dropped on Friday, and my ears are happy.
HEILUNG (a German noun meaning “healing” in English) is an experimental folk music band made up of members from Denmark, Norway, and Germany. Their music is based on texts and runic inscriptions from Germanic peoples of the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Viking Age — they describe their music as "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe." One of their songs was used in a trailer for THE NORTHMAN.
I’ve said of their previous albums Futha and Ofnir, HEILUNG is exactly what it would sound like if Skeksis, Mystics, and Gelflings from THE DARK CRYSTAL all got together and started a band, perhaps even with background vocals by Tolkien’s Elves and Orcs. Some of their songs and spoken word pieces, recited often in Old Norse, are visceral and frightening, full of screeches, otherworldly voices and throat-singing along with soaring melodies and chants.
Their new album DRIF leans a bit less on the scary Orcs and Skeksis and more on the ethereal Elf and Gelfling melodies. It’s not so much an album for casual listening as it is a transcendent sonic experience to intently enter with headphones and let the stories wash over you.
There are notes in this track and images in its video that give goose bumps.
In the track entitled TENET is a musical palindrome, where all individual musical parts, melodies and instruments – and even at times the lyrics – play the same both forward and backwards.
“The song is based on the Sator Square, the earliest datable two-dimensional palindrome, first found in Herculaneum (Italy), a city buried under the ashes of the erupting Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, at that time part of the flourishing Roman Empire. What is particularly interesting with this palindrome is that not only does it read forwards and backwards but also vertically in both directions.”
I don’t quite understand this, but I love it.
Their music literally has power, and reaches deep into some primal core of humanity’s collective history in a way I can’t really describe, except to say it must be approached with an open mind. Once you do, it will make its way into your heart and other dark places that might need healing. You may not even know you are broken, but you may come out feeling repaired.
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