Name: Kadri Sammel aka Bedless Bones
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, interdisciplinary artist
Nationality: Estonian
Current release: Bedless Bones's third full-length album Mire of Mercury is out via Metropolis.

If you enjoyed this Bedless Bones interview and would like to find out more about her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.

For an even deeper dive, we recommend our earlier Bedless Bones Interview about her creative process, around the re-release of her debut album Sublime Malaise, and her thoughts on voice and singing.



What made the mercury image mentioned in "I Want More" seem like the perfect term to name the entire album after?

The working title of the album was Mercurial, and it began with an introspective peek into the mercurial zones of my own temperament. At some point it turned into an element and began to flow.

My first album’s title Sublime Malaise describes a state of being, and so does Mire of Mercury.

There is an interesting juxtaposition in “Dead Woman.” On the one hand, you write “Dreams and words are your sepulcher,” then, later, “Illusions endure when senses lie.” From your perspective as an artists, what is the connection between sense organs and our inner world? Where do you see the seat of reality?

We are all confined to our flesh vehicles and the thoughts of our own mortality and perceiving the world through our subjective experience are huge. Isn’t that one of the functions of art, to allow us as an observer to process all those different depictions of reality and see the world through many eyes?

These ideas about death, and losing one’s body and senses, blood and so on, seem grim, and maybe I have that eschatological streak. But for me it’s crucial to process those thoughts.

I may die tomorrow, and I don’t want to not have been thinking about it before.

There is a beautiful line in “Blood Citadel”: "Don’t want to speak cause I know you know." It seems fitting in relation to music, as the heart of music seems to lie in communicating without words or with the subtext of the words.

I agree, music doesn’t need words at all. Even though I’m very fascinated with language and words, I’m sometimes so wary of them. I’ve thought about releasing an instrumental album, as I have dozens of tracks that I don’t feel like singing on.

At the same time, silence shouldn’t be wallowed in, not for extended periods of time. I used Julia Kristeva’s “Black Sun,” an essay about depression, as a reference point for the lyrics of “Dead Woman,” a song which is actually about overcoming depression, and she writes:

“Melancholia ends up in asymbolia, in loss of meaning: if I am no longer capable of translating or metaphorizing, I become silent and I die.”

I found this thought to be poignant, and warning. She also describes Anne, a woman in despair, who describes herself as being at the edge of words and at the edge of her skin, with the bottom of her sorrow remaining unreachable. It’s how the pendulum can swing too far to the other way, and one can feel incapable of finding a way back.

Coming back to “Blood Citadel,” the line you mentioned is silence in a completely different context, about being secure in shared silence. And that is, of course, a beautiful thing.

When announcing the album, you used the term psychedelia. It's not a word most people would use, but it makes complete sense musically.  What does it mean to you in terms of the lyrics?

It does make sense, even though the music hasn’t got much in common with, say, psychedelic rock. But actually it was Anders, Bedless Bones’s drummer, who is not a part of the recording process, he used the term to describe the album. He called it psychedelic futurepop.

I don’t really agree with the futurepop part, but the psychedelic elements are there in synth production and writing.

Are there authors and poets which you draw from for your own words or even your ideas for music?

I have many writers and artists, whose writing inspires me; for this particular album I used themes of alchemy from C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, for example.

“Litha” reads like a description of experiencing a litha. What is the meaning of the litha celebrations for you personally? What do you associate with it?

Litha or midsummer celebrations are a huge annual thing where I’m from.

For the past five years, I’ve spent midsummer at my best friend’s countryside home, where there has been non-stop music for two days, a huge bonfire, swimming, hedonism and lotus-eating. The song is pretty much about that time.

The song “Litha” uses the lines “Above Heaven and under hell” as well as “Growing roots Running Wild.” In comparison, “Map to the Stars” states “I'm afraid to be free.” How would you describe your own sense of freedom, what real freedom means and how art provides for a free space to you.

Like many other themes I explore on the album (death, body, words, silence), freedom is looked at from different perspectives. Conventions, expectations from society and day to day worries can confine a person and push them into self-destructive behaviour. Likewise, total freedom, without any duties and discipline can do the same thing. Humans seem to be prone to self-immolation.

The feelings of not being equipped for this world are not foreign to me, but I’m from the generation where you don’t make too much fuss about it, move on, and maybe swear or cry about it later in private.

Art is definitely the space where I can be confrontational, weird, destructive, and also vulnerable. It’s where I’m guarded with the veil of make-believe.

I would probably interpret the line “Above Heaven and under hell” to refer more to paganism as to art specifically. But I do find that it's a good description of art as well, in that it allows us to imagine and express things beyond the imaginable or nameable. What's your take on art as a the current age's religion and the eternal polarity between music as escapism and a revolutionary force?

This is a tough one. I think the role of music is more complex than the duality of political/revolutionary versus escapism/aesthetic pleasure. All art is a response to current times, and what we consume as art is a reflection of our needs.

Art and music feed our souls, and what kind of food we need depends on what we’re hungry for. I listen to music that speaks to me, and overlook the rest. I’ve never understood people  who get agitated over the fact that there is music out there that they don’t like or find inferior or meaningless. Who cares, people are allowed to make any kind of art they like.

The music industry and its mechanisms are another topic, but artists should be allowed to touch on any subject matter they want.

The words to “Litha” seem to have been written a lot from visual ideas, including a fascinating reference to the painting “Flaming June.” What established these connections and how you go from these impressions to the finished song?

Many of these images came to mind with writing in a similar way to free association. I had to look up “Flaming June” to see if it was how I remembered it.

I wanted to talk about something I noticed three songs, “Uncomfortable,” “Thunder,” and “Quick, Silver.”.For one, there are garden images in two of them, once directly once referred (“Arcadia” as a utopian garden). Then, there is “mercury”, once explicitly mentioned once with a play on words (“Quick, silver”). Is it that, while writing songs in a certain timeframe, particular images, words and ideas are somehow stuck in your mind? Or is there a lot of conscious construction at work here?

These recurring images or motifs are deliberately repeated, and being put in slightly different contexts. The garden is a cultivated space of resources and tranquillity. Actually, “Uncomfortable” trails thematically close behind “Litha”. “Litha” bursts with bright hedonistic ecstasy, and “Uncomfortable” takes a darker turn and warns about eventually having to wake up.

I sometimes see the album as a labyrinth, where these ideas are connected with a string. But Ariadne’s thread doesn’t lead you out, it takes you further in. Is there even a Minotaur?

Would you say that creativity is simply the connecting of ideas which are otherwise not connected – or which we typically see as being unconnected?

Creativity can be as extensive as worldbuilding or condensed like putting huge concepts into minimal forms.

Connecting what seems unconnected, yes.

In the song “Thunder”, you write: “I want the days of thunder, where no one can outrun the storm, rummaging in the mire for fun.” Why would you want that – to not be able to outrun the storm?

There’s something pleasurable in the thought of a natural disaster ending us all.

Many artists have stated that they can only really understand the meaning of their lyrics some time after completing a record. With regards to the new album, have there been things you've noticed in this regard when reading the words to Mire of Mercury?

More time needs to pass, it’s all too close and clear to me still.