Heilung – Eivør – A Folk Rite For The Spirit. As night descended over Brixton, something ancient began to stir. It was not the usual anticipation of a crowd waiting for a performance nor the noise of busy streets or bustling queues. This was something otherworldly, an excited hum battling against a hush, like the stillness before thunder or the pause before a raven cries through the trees.
Heilung – Eivør
O2 Academy Brixton – 15 April 2025
Words: Ash Nash
Photography: Manuela Langotsch
In Norse tradition, birds were more than mere creatures. They were omens, messengers from unseen realms, voices that echoed across time and spirit.
Tonight, it was Eivør and Heilung who answered the call. Their presence was the cry, and their music the wings. We, the gathering outside O2 Academy Brixton, were drawn in like shadows at the coming of dusk.
Eivør
Eivør stepped into the light with the stillness of snow and the force of a storm. From the Faroe Islands, her music is shaped by wild cliffs, salt winds, the myths of her homeland, and the ache of ancient song.
Her voice held the crowd like a spell. Sometimes sharp and crystalline, sometimes volcanic and raw, it moved like weather through the body. One moment, she was the tide. The next, a flame flickering in the void.
Her band, which felt more like an extension of her being than a group of musicians, changed with her like tectonic plates in sync. Vocoder swells, throat-sung refrains, eerie synth soundscapes, and delicate strings created a soundscape in which lullabies transformed into invocations and love songs became elemental forces.
The audience moved reverently to songs like Trøllabundin and the latest Enn.
When she took a sip of water, the audience clapped in amazement rather than irony. Even the act of breathing seemed sacrosanct. When the final song rang out like the closing bell of a vision, many people stood frozen, unable to let go of what had just happened to them.
Then, there was stillness. A deeper kind of quiet. The lights began to dim. The incense thickened. Bird calls rose from the darkness, the kind that marks the boundary between this world and the next. Shadows swept across the stage like memories.
Heilung
The opening chant was not music but a prayer, a spell cast through meaning rather than melody.
Remember that we all are brothers
All people, beasts, trees and stone and wind
We all descend from the one great being
That was always there
Before people lived and named it
Before the first seed sprouted
And with those words, the veil lifted.
Heilung stepped forward not as performers but as something older and deeper — shamans calling through time. Their name means healing in German, and it is no metaphor.
This is music as transformation, as connection, as a sacred ritual.
At the centre are three guiding spirits: Kai Uwe Faust, a German tattoo artist and throat singer steeped in Norse tradition; Maria Franz, a classically trained Norwegian vocalist whose voice moves like wind through pine; and Christopher Juul, the Danish sound alchemist weaving it all into something timeless.
But the stage holds more than sound. It holds warriors and dancers and the weight of memory. Instruments carved from bone and bronze echo through the space. Nothing is done by chance. Every breath becomes a rhythm. Every movement carries a story.
The drums began with five stations forming a circle around the centre, like ancient forces in motion. Each beat sank deeper into forgotten soil. This was not music in any modern sense. It was pulse, chant, offering, and reclamation. Antlers crowned on heads and runes marking the skin.
The stage was no longer a performance space. It became an altar, a place where spirits stirred and returned, if only for the space of a single heartbeat.
Songs like In Maidjan set the tone, its primal pulse drawing the crowd into its ancient cadence. The rhythms of Norupo followed each beat like the heartbeat of the Earth itself, grounding the audience at the moment. When Alfadhirhaiti rang out, it carried with it the weight of ancient prophecy, each note a call to something primal and vast.
As the night deepened, songs like Asja and Svanrand wove a thread of haunting beauty and elemental power. The audience was no longer passive. They were participants in a ritual that connected them to something greater than themselves.
In Urbani, the pulse quickened, invoking the strength of warriors and the energy of the Earth. By the time Tenet rang through the venue, there was no distinction between the performers and the crowd — the space was filled with a shared breath, a collective soul.
The opening lines of Othan sliced through the air, every word a declaration, every movement on stage a step in an ancient dance. In Anoana, the crowd swayed as though caught in a trance, carried by the rhythm, their collective heartbeat synchronising with the beat of Heilung’s drums.
And then came Galgaldr, a song of incantation, each syllable a mystic key unlocking something deep within.
When Nikkal reverberated through the hall, it was as though the very walls of O2 Academy Brixton were shaking in resonance with the power of the ritual. The atmosphere thickened, and the crowd stood mesmerised, caught in the energy that flowed from the stage.
By the time Elddansurin brought the night to a boiling point, the crowd were lost to the rhythm, their movements a reflection of the primal forces unleashed. When the final strains of Hamrer Hippyer echoed through the venue, it felt like the closing of a portal, the final words leaving the air thick with reverence and awe.
Some cheered. Others wept. Many simply stood still, unwilling to disturb the energy that still crackled in the air. Outside, beneath the cold flicker of the city’s streetlamps, we stepped back into London.
But we were not unchanged. The smoke still clung to our coats. The drums still echoed somewhere deep in the body. A raven, perhaps, flew overhead, it’s call long and dark across the rooftops.
And maybe, if you listened closely, the wind carried a name you had forgotten.
This was not a show. It was a return. A rite. A story passed from breath to breath. Something deeply human and beyond language.
Eivør and Heilung did not merely perform. They remembered. In doing so, they made us remember.
Inside the venue, time dissolved into ritual. Sage smoke coiled into the blue-lit air, soft and spiralling like a whispered invocation. The walls and rafters of the academy transformed into a sacred grove: part dream, part theatre, part myth incarnate. It was not a concert.
Not only music.
A spell.
A healing.
A homecoming.
A beautiful ritual that went beyond the scope of a typical concert
It was a conjuring. A rite enacted by breath and music. Everyone in attendance was more than just a spectator. They were witnesses. Participating. Remembering.
This night was a circle of aged souls roused from sleep.
