For years, Kai Uwe Faust has stood at the forefront of ritualistic and immersive music through his work with Heilung, helping shape performances that feel less like concerts and more like ancient ceremonies brought into the modern world. Now, with Kriigerkvlt, Faust steps into a new realm entirely, one built around experimentation, instinct, and unrestricted human expression.
In this conversation, Kai Uwe Faust discusses the origins of Kriigerkvlt, the creative philosophy driving the project, and the spiritual and artistic differences that separate it from his previous work. From ritual and performance to freedom and transformation, this interview offers a deeper look into the mind behind one of the most unique musical visions emerging today.
Adam Colwell (AC): So we are here with Kai Uwe Faust to talk about his new project Kriigerkvlt. So we talked about Heilung. So this is a new project that Kai and a lot of the Warriors are working on. The new single just came out Mahakala. If you haven’t heard it, go listen to it. So we just want to take a little deep dive into this project. So thanks for joining me. So to start off, how would you describe the spiritual difference between Heilung and Kriigerkvlt?
Kai Uwe Faust (KUF): Yeah. Thanks again for showing up, for wanting to listen to more. Thank you for having me. And yeah, it’s generally very simple. Like Kriigerkvlt is something which is completely open, towards collaborations with other bands and also for the expression of the people that are in it. In Kriigerkvlt we consciously like to focus on fundamentally different things than we do in Heilung. And we’re more, looking in the future, so to say, like at the cost of the apocalyptic scenario where people, you know, very much, like I said before, live in a world like Mad Max or like wasteland style, and remember, kind of like fragments of their former spirituality, remember parts of how it used to be, but only from like, tales of their grandparents and everything. And that’s basically it. But it was supposed to be fun.
AC: So everybody knows Heilung represents healing. If you could describe Kriigerkvlt in one word, what would that be?
KUF: Madness.
AC: So, do you feel like as an artist, Kriigerkvlt allows you to explore parts of yourself that Heilung does not?
KUF: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like Heilung has a very clear topic in ancient, European cultures, specifically the Viking age, Bronze Age and stuff like that. That is something you will not see in Kriigerkvlt. And also like in Heilung we use a lot of reconstructed old instruments while Kriigerkvltlike open for like whatever instruments the members are able to play. That ranges from like a modern drum kit to other guitars and also a lot of like crazy stuff. Starting from like letting chains drop into singing bowls and like, you know, scratching stones, all that. Yeah, yeah. All right.
AC: Awesome. So Kriigerkvlt seems to be more about experimenting with human expression. Also, was that intentional from the start?
KUF: Well it started more or less like an invitation from a band, Danish band John Connor, written with an X. John CXOR because they were not allowed to use the actual name of John Connor that is actually protected by the guys that made Terminator and that was that was the start. So we got invited to collaborate with these guys, and it came later. It came after the first cooperation when we were sitting together and had the idea, okay, let’s, let’s make something on our own and like everyone introduce something that they never introduced to a Heilung. That was me bringing in Sanskrit and Buddhism which you never will find in Heilung. And it will also never find a bass guitar in Heilung.You will never find a modern drum kit in Heilung. And it basically is like enjoying the freedom, enjoying the skills, having a good time together, having a good laugh, you know, doing something very unconventional.
AC: So it just seems like a blast. So Kriigerkvlt sounds like a black metal band. I mean, just the name you hear and you’re like, oh, it’s black metal. Will we see any more black metal influence as you go forward, or is that off the table?
KUF: I think black metal is for sure one of the inspirations, I mean, most most of our members have like a tendency to listen to the more extreme side of music and also are able to express that extreme side, especially vocally. I mean, like there there will be always a lot of screaming and a lot of madness, a lot of like really shrieking going on. So it will always contain very extreme lyrics. And we, we try to really go to the maximum there, but it will always be all the elements. I don’t think that we will ever make a clear like category black metal song.
AC: Okay. So I know a lot of us can Scandinavian or black metal bands have moved towards Scandinavian folk music and northern European music. And I know you’re a huge fan of black metal in the extreme metal. Have you ever had as an artist that kind of shift happened to you, that being in black metal kind of led you to more of the Scandinavian folk?
KUF: For me personally, yes. Very much. I mean, as a young person, as like a teenager, I was very consequently listening to like, really, Yeah. Yeah. Like Black Metal style and There’s especially like one album with the Bathory “Hammerheart” that really had this like very, very strong vibe of like Nordic mythology. And I was diving from there basically towards Nordic mythology and got anchored there more and more.
AC: So why was Mahakala the right place to introduce the world to this new project of yours.
KUF: Yeah, I think Mahakala is a very, very important aspect or it contains very important aspects because like when people hear like Kriigerkvlt and they try to translate there’s the word warrior in it, right? And that is like a big word, like especially linked to war, at least linked to combat to fighting. But of course, like we’re not encouraging people to like go out there and like, beat people up or shoot people. That is wrong, okay? Don’t beat people. Don’t shoot people. Like, try to avoid that at any cost. Right. It’s bad karma. But that fight, that combat, we have that in ourselves, right? And we do this in it’s the teaching is basically that all the obstacles you face on the outside are just reflections of your obstacles from the inside, and Mahakala is like an old pre Buddhist Shamanistic deity transforming into Buddhism as this protector of the Dharma, the protector of the teaching, the removal of obstacles. This like inner warrior that we all carry in ourselves no matter what gender identity yourself with that is so important to like, really face, face your own challenges, face your own inner enemy and like face that element inside of you that makes life difficult for you to face.That element inside of you that basically blocks you from living to your full potential. You know, that is what fighting is about. That is what the path of the inner warriors about me and Mahakala is really expressing that really beautifully, traditionally and in the modern.
AC: So given the spiritual significance of Mahakala, was there any hesitation of center and the song around it, and how much spiritual and research went into actually developing the song?
KUF: From my side? Of course, I am very, very rooted in Nordic mythology, and it is also beyond belief for me. That is, you know, living in the North, living in Scandinavia. I experience Nordic mythology in my day to day life, you know, but I also have a very strong leg in Buddhism. So the research was basically done already and I was just feeding it in, you know, the moment, the moment we knew, okay, like we got to record something. That was the moment where everyone had to bring something on the table. You know, and like, I, I can’t play guitar, I can’t play piano, but I know my I know my Sanskrit, I know my mantras. So I put the mantra on the table. And then the other musicians were like, completely free to express themselves around it to them. Like I was just basically giving the bone, and the flesh was done by the other side, the skin and the hair to create that effigy because, yeah.
AC: So going forward, do you think that Kriigercvlt will continue to explore other religious systems and spiritual beliefs?
KUF: Yeah, I think we’re pretty open and like we have a multiple range of interests, you know, and what all unites us for sure is the love is the love to nature. And maybe the next song paints more forest elements. Or maybe we even see about birds. Who knows?
AC: So your work often walks along between spirituality and performance art. How do you personally draw the boundary and how important is that discomfort in your art?
KUF: Yeah, Michael Harner that I mentioned before in the interview, he classified three stages of trance. So one one stage is where you actually lay down motionless and you leave your body. Basically you’re traveling and then you have the second stage of trance, which is you are like a part of your mind is in that trance condition, while another part of your mind and your body are still present in the everyday work. And this we find that very strong in, for example, in the Australian Aborigines when they walk the dream path. So they, they basically hike, you know, and they do a very long hike, but at the same time they’re like meditating or traveling in their mind. And this second stage of meditation, the second stage of trance, is something I experience very often when I create things when I arrive, lyrics when I sing. And I also tried to, you know, lure people into that to experience that as well. I hear that a part of you is dancing, but another part of you is like really flying away. And it’s like, you know, free of gravity. And the third stage is, Michael Garner called that unity. And it’s that moment like people that work with plant medicine, like mushrooms or ayahuasca or stuff like that, they experienced that very often. And people that do like the long term meditation practices, they also get to that point, and that is the point where you really feel united with, with the creation and where you deeply understand that the creation and the creator are one, that we are endlessly loved and that we basically. Reincarnation is real, maybe not as with our mind, but that everything is always in motion. And then this deep understanding that is called the or like Micheal Harner classified that as the third type of trance, and that is supported by certain rhythms, by certain BPM’s. You can reach that state without any drugs as well. And I also try to create art, create music that helps people to maybe reach that condition as well, because it’s very beautiful.
AC: Yeah, that’s really beautiful. So in the form of unity, the Kriigerkvlt collective involves a bunch of the warriors from Heilung? How did those relationships, how did that help with the chemistry and the collaboration process of the project?
KUF: Well, in order to be part of Kriigerkvlt, you need to be a member of the Heilung Choir. So like most of the Heilung members in general, they have other side projects but they are individuals. And we try to act on stage as one living organism. And Kriigerkvlt is basically that organism detached from the Heilung universe. And that is basically how we function, how we roll with everything, with all the ups and downs, lights and shadows.
AC: So basically join the cult. You have to go through Heilung.
KUF: For sure.
AC: Okay. How collaborative is the song writing process and what do you look for beyond musical ability, musical talent, and a collaboration process? Is there something somebody else can bring to the table that, like you said, you can’t play guitar, you can’t play drums, or you have some maybe somebody and screaming, well, or they have like this really brilliant idea of, I don’t know, a different deity or something. What would it take to set up that collaboration?
KUF: You mean when we as Kriigerkvlt collaborate with another band?
AC: Yes.
KUF: Yeah. That is completely open. I mean, like, you know what? Whatever. Like for example, we are gonna perform on Copenhell together with John Connor again and in that collaboration, they basically wrote the lyrics and they gave us basically a wish list, how they imagined the collaboration to be there. There will also be other bands involved, and we’re just a part of it. Right. So there’s no egotism. Okay. This is how it has to be if we want to collaborate with you. We’re basically attaching ourselves to a greater organism and performing with them.
AC: So your projects often focus on history and spiritual ritual. Looking at these traditions, what do you think modern society is missing today in contemporary culture?
KUF: That is a big question. I can write a book about this. I think what we’re missing is a very important thing which we’re also losing more and more, unfortunately but at the same time, some people regain that community. We are living in a society these days where we get, we live in a solution that we can function and live on our own, but we are not made like that. We’re flock animals and we need community. We need people to back us up. We need people to hunt for us when we can’t do it ourselves. We need people to take care of us when we’re old. Like psychology says that we need four hugs a day to maintain your psychological stability, stuff like that. Right? But when we’re sitting in concrete cubes and looking at black mirrors, we lack all of that. And we also like, unlearn all the social skills and practical skills to, like, function in a society, function in a community. Right. So I think that is one of the most profound things that our society lacks these days. And I think it’s beautiful to like, you know, see moments like yesterday evening, for example, where everyone packs away the phone, where people actually talk, you know, where we perform silly games together, where we laugh together, you know, like where that is. That is like memorable times, you know, like, listen to the story of other people. Like, I think that is one of the biggest challenges of our time.
AC: So given that lack of community, do you think that that’s why Heilung, for instance, has been so successful? And why Kriigerkvlt will be successful is because people crave the communal experience, the ritual experiences. And events like yesterday, just being together.
KUF: Yeah, I think people have a deep, deep, deep, conscious or unconscious craving to be in a group of people where they where they feel seen, you know, and where they feel you see all the way to the inside. Because I always say people grow like trees. So we have these inner children, wounded or not, we have a deep inside of us and all our life is founded, is based, is sitting on these inner children. Wounded or not we have them deep inside of us. And all of our lives are sitting on these inner children. And we need people around us that see that, you know, that see in the grown man, a small boy that needs protection, that we see in a woman, we see that small girl that really needs people to, to be taken care of, you know, and like or whatever. However you define yourself gender wise, you are all of us. We have this very helpless, very fragile being inside of us. Like maybe we grow up and we got to be strong and we have muscles and we have like a big shell or like some kind of behavior that we think that protects us. But we always need a moment where we can let the guard down, where we can, like, connect to each other. Because if we keep up the mask, if we keep up the shelf, we can’t really connect. And I see that happening time and again, and I read it in the comments as well, that in the Heilung concerts that is happening, people meet people where they really feel seen, where they feel accepted, where they share passions, where they share lifestyles and everything. And where they feel home.
AC: And that’s what’s so beautiful about it. It’s like every one of the Heilung rituals we went to, it’s been that way. I mean, you always meet somebody new.. Last night there was people from all over the United States that came in because of that. But the other side of it, if you look at movies and books, there’s almost, some of the older spiritualities and mythologies are almost romanticized. Do you think that there’s a danger in people romanticize the spiritual, ancient spirituality without fully understanding it?
KUF: Tough questions. I think it is really, really hard. It requires long studies to get even close to something that we believe now is a proper understanding of ancient mythologies. And we can look at, for example, if you read a joke from only like 300 years back, you will not find it funny and you will not understand it and like to really claim that, okay, we got it, we understand it. I think that is really, really difficult and hopeful to say because there’s always unsure aspects, like in German science, for example, like if you are a proper German scientist, you have a certain type of language and that type of language. They will always say, I believe, I know because science and religious studies and everything is permanently evolving. They gather knowledge more and more. And if we go back only like 50 years or like in Germany, let’s go back 80 years, the understanding of Nordic mythology was fundamentally different than it was today. You know, we discovered more and more stuff. Archaeology and unearthing more and more stuff. And I remember when I was still a tattoo artist, I had a lady there from Iceland, and she was working in the National Archive in Iceland. And of course, we had a really good talk and like, you know, spend a good time making a big tattoo. And I remember she said, like, if we would translate and publish everything that we have in the library in Iceland it would rewrite world history.
AC: Great answer. So, we had a conversation yesterday kind of talking about how you got started, your path. So do you care to, you know, kind of explain the process of going from a tattoo artist, you know, moving from Germany to Denmark and then getting out of tattoos once you became a musician, a performing artist and just how that path went.
KUF: Yeah. As I said before, I started Tattooing in 2000, and that was, for me, one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. When my teacher, when my teacher basically chose me to give me that occasion, I was at that time, it was very different and very difficult to get a proper tattoo education and evolving from there, like becoming successful relatively quick. And also I was able to live from my art and also put a little bit of money aside. I realized one of my biggest dreams, and that was to travel to Scandinavia and like already on my first trip to Scandinavia, I met my future bandmates Kristoffer and Maria in the In the Viking Reenactment Society, and they were also like me. We knew each other already and when I moved to to Denmark, I accidentally found a place to live, accidentally found a place to live, which was only a couple of hundred meters away from their house and studio. So we were hanging out quite a bit, you know, and I was still like, full on working as a tattoo artist and I honestly was never dreaming about ever becoming a performance artist slash musician. I never thought that I could be like my thing. And when I approached Krristoffer to originally just record a couple of poems for me, we started out by reciting poems. But of course he’s a music producer, so he was bored relatively quickly, you know, and then at some point I remember he asked me, can you sing something? And I was like, yeah, I can, I can sing something, but it’s just like shamanic mumbling. I use it for ceremonies in small circles in the forest and like, you know, that’s like more or less a secret thing. And I never, never really went public with that. He was like, okay, like, give it a go. So I gave it a go. I remember, his looked like. And he basically locked me in the recording booth. And made me go bit by bit for like a couple of months through my whole repertoire. And then we also invited my teacher for Core Shamanism over and on the first album you can hear him as well, whistling drumming and on the album there’s even just like I was tattooing traditionally. So I had a lot of traditional techniques that I was performing. And you can also hear on the album, you can hear tattoo sticks making, making rhythms. So it was like everything was blending into each other and blossoming in certain areas. And then in 2022, that was the point where I realized, okay, I cannot make the two work,I cannot do both anymore. Because like Heilung grew more and more, it took away more and more of my time. And at the same time, me as a person, without doing anything for it, got like more and more known and more and more people wanted to have a tattoo from the Heilung singer. And, when I stopped tattooing in 2022, I stopped with a one and a half year waiting list.. And that is what it is like. That is just not realistic. You know, that it was out of realistic proportions and like, I didn’t want to like, I really didn’t want to because I was defining myself over being a tattoo artist. My social life was like happening basically in the tattoo scene and like, you know, it was good money in it and a lot of recognition. And, you know, like, I work many, many different things in my life. I worked as a builder and like different other things that are sometimes not that one, never mind. But when you work as a tattoo artist, at the end of the day, you will get an honest thank you will get that honest thank you from a completely trashed person and went through hours of pain. But that honest thank you is something really, really beautiful to experience. And that was really hard for me to let that go, you know, to let that be just like in German, we say you go under someone’s skin and that is, you touch someone and you literally do, you know, and I really loved it. But then in 22, that was the end of my tattoo program.
AC: So just a follow up. Is there any future where you’re getting older, you can’t perform, you can’t tour all the time. Would you ever go back to tattooing?
KUF: It is hard for me to imagine doing that, to be honest. I mean, you should never say never, but I mean both jobs, so to say. Tattoo artists don’t retire. You know, like, most of the, like, really famous and like, old school tattoo artists. They basically like one of my big idols is Albert Hoffmann. Sorry. Not Albert. Herbert Hoffmann. I like Albert Hoffmann as well. He did a good, good job for humanity. But Herbert Hoffmann was a really old school tattoo artist. He was a German child soldier in the war. He was detained in Russia for a long time. And in the Gulag he learned tattooing and he was tattooing all his life. He was a gay person, which was why you can’t imagine, right, to be a gay person in the 50s and 60s in Germany. And all that is not easy. And he was an icon, an icon of the tattooing, especially like old school to tour in Hamburg and everything. And I had the great honor to meet him in person before he died. And Herbert, he was like, he was the sweetest person, you know, like he was like especially towards other tattoo artists. He was so caring, always sharing his knowledge, very empathic, always smiling, always hugging. And I think he was tattooing until two weeks before he died. And then again, another one of my great idols Lemmy Kilmister. You know, like there’s no I don’t think that I will retire. I’ll just go strong until I collapse.
AC: So you’re going to be a lifer to the end. So we’ll bring it back to Kriigerkvlt, thanks for the little backstory. So it’s Kriigerkvlt meant to be constantly evolving.
KUF: That is a good question. I don’t think so. Because like, Heilung is something that was and is constantly evolving and it’s constantly growing and like these two, the two projects, they should never go in concurrence. So I can very well imagine that right now we’re here. We did some recording, a couple of us, but I can very well imagine that in the relatively near future, Kriigerkvlt will take a step back, especially when the Heilung is really getting in full throttle again.It will just plainly be no time.
AC: So the last question is the standard: what can people expect going forward? Can you give us any hints?
KUF: You mean going forward with Kriigerkvlt?
AC: Yeah.
KUF: Well, I mean you probably sense something is bubbling right. I think what you can expect is genuine. So what you for sure can expect is real emotion and something that is done without mask, something that is done with true vulnerability and something that is done with honesty. Because I think that is something that we’re also lacking in this society these days.
AC: That’s beautiful. And I think that’s all we could really ask for. But thank you for your time and thanks for answering my questions. I can’t wait to see what y’all have in store for us next.
