Incense and sage in the air. Wildborn shadows moving in the dark. To step into a Heilung concert is to willingly abandon the confines of the present time and space and enter a primordial dreamscape where sound is a living breathing creature. The performance is presented not as a mere music concert but as an ancient ritual, a ceremonial forging of spirit and earth.

The stage itself becomes a living altar, shrouded in mist and crowned with antlered silhouettes, as if the very bones of forgotten forests have risen to bear witness. 

War drums thunder like the heartbeat of an animal in fear, awakening an ancestral memory buried deep within the marrow. Voices rise, a chorus of spirits, weaving incantations that dance upon the air like smoke from burning leaves.

Most of the bands play music. Heilung summons demons and gods from a world both brutal and beautiful, made of bodies, blood, sweat and spirit, where the wild heart of humanity roars before it was tamed. To witness it is to partake in a rite of passage towards the within, to be baptized in sound older than memory and to emerge renewed. 

Even an institutional venue like the Arcimboldi Theatre in Milan was literally shaking to the wild crescendo of Hamrer Hippyer, their last song before the closing ceremony, with everyone in the crowd literally jumping off of their seats. The stately aura of Maria Franz mitigates the warriors’ ferocity, infusing the scene with a trance-like serenity, while remaining a haunting presence like a shaman that guides us through the darkness of our minds.

All about their ceremony has been curated to the next level: sound, lights and set design, costumes, choreography; everything is brought together by a restless energy so true and spellbinding, that kind of energy coming from within that can’t be faked. Each movement, each chant, each clash of wood and iron feels orchestrated by unseen forces. The performers are not musicians, but vessels through which the raw, untamed forces of nature and myth are given form.

Time fractures, and the audience drifts above the river Styx, through a realm where centuries dissolve into mist and the spirit finds its healing.