FAUN – HEX

Du bist eine Zauberin, I sing around my house. Ein Wort und die Welt steht still. Voices breathe around the words and hoist them up, floating.

If your first experience of music as a genre that transports you happened to be Enya’s Orinoco Flow and you also watched Lord of the Rings at a pivotal and impressionable age, you are then familiar with the invisible threshold between the palpable and the sublime that melody and harmony make easiest to cross.

I have had HEX on incessant replay since its launch date. I played it twice in its entirety one workday Wednesday, having to resist the temptation to restart it as soon as it was over. This almost never happens. The first listen, especially of a band I like, is when I am at my most critical, most heavily comparing the new work to the old. So for me to be so besotted with it signals it as an instantaneous triumph of a record.

The story of FAUN, now in their third decade of activity, sees a band deeply rooted in traditional melody and vocal techniques, both classical and folkloric, who are able to take influences from multiple cultures of Northwestern Europe and the Mediterranean basin and blend them in a sound that feels ancient, tuned to the present and, most importantly, true.

Authenticity struggles in the folk-pagan-nordic genre, if one quick look at the amount of “Dark Viking/Norse music” on Youtube is any indicator. Following the incredible mainstream success of Wardruna and Heilung around the world, there is no shortage of imitators and as often happens, appearances are mimicked, while the research, reasoning and meaning of the originals is lost or deemed unimportant.

FAUN thrive in the research. There are no shortcuts taken in HEX. From the army of period instruments to the tight polyphonic harmonies, the overall impression upon first listen is of folk songs lifted and updated for modern ears, every inch true to their respective eras. After all, this is a band who, on their previous album Luna, covered Cuncti Simus, first recorded in the 14th century manuscript Llibre Vermell de Montserrat. Now they’ve brought to life Ylfa Spere, a real Old English spell, dating back to the 11th century.

Blot stuck to me the most through those first listens, the chorus bringing in tenor and bass and making space in the mix for an overall impression of overwhelming voices towering over you. Its effect is similar to Wardruna’s earlier albums, the same hint at something frightening (I will sacrifice to the fire and then I will ask), yet speaking from a position of power to a higher seat of power, confident, unyielding, brave.

But while they’re serious about the stories they bring back to life, that doesn’t mean the music is one of sobriety and restraint. On the contrary, the album is most notably danceable. Incorporating Irish fiddle runs, the hurdy-gurdy, the bagpipes with their immediate call to action, flutes and drums, the image is that of a fae troupe in the middle of the forest, spinning madly around a roaring fire, leaves in their hair and floating skirts flaring. Just take the album’s only instrumental, Vals. Try to resist it.

I was raised on choral pieces. To this day, a fine-tuned multi-layered vocal harmony (from small groups like Idrîsî Ensemble or giant ones like demanded by Carmina Burana) feels like soaking my brain into a hot bath. All my synapses relax, all critical thinking stops. So from Belladonna to Alfar, the album both soothes through its escapist sound and relentlessly reminds us of a worldview on the brink of destruction, one where “Magick is intention that turns a song into a prayer” as Chelsea Wolfe‘s voice is testament to.

The album’s name hints at the German “Hexe”, “witch”, not in the warty evil Witch-Trials-esque fearful image the word has in English, but its more magical counterpart, the Hagazussa, the one who walks between worlds, the sorceress. It’s only fitting that the song I sing to myself the most is Zauberin. With its latter half delving into the joyful, through fiddle and hurdy-gurdy, this is not a meeting with a dreadful terrifying Circe, but with a being so entrusting in their power, they smile graciously upon you, welcome you into their arms, spare your life.

We speak these days of “pretty privilege” and the dangers of the beauty industry, but mythological beauty is a physical representation of a perfect God’s existence. This is no longer beauty as a consumer good, to be bought or bartered; it is holy, from the same cloth as Dostoyevsky’s beauty that “will save the world”. When the Turkish song UMAY speaks of “In the gardens of basil, who’s that beautiful girl? / Oh my beauty, come to me / Let me wrap a silk scarf round your neck“, there is none of the fearfulness or trauma a modern folk song would have imbued it with. Instead, it feels so right, like the steps of a dance, like beckoning a spirit and making an offering.

This elevated plane of existence, the belief in the magic of the sorceress who need speak but a “word and the world sits still” feeds and flows confidently through the whole album, proof that beauty still exists and it can still save the world.