HUMAN BONES ANGIENT RITUAUS ADIDAS SNEAKERS?
If you need to get your hands on some human bones, Kai Uwe Faust can point you in the right direction. Back in 2015, he and his bandmates in Heilung decided their debut album, Ofnir, would benefit from some unique percussive sounds, and figured the remnants of a skeleton would do the trick. Luckily, Kai - as Heilung’s co-vocalist and unofficial Head Of Spirituality - had come into possession of some.
“I’m a tattoo artist” he says, his voice the embodiment of cold German menace. “I have connections. People who don’t pay...”
He lets the sentence hang. There’s an uncomfortable silence. Then he laughs and the spell breaks. “No, they came from the university.”
It transpires that it isn’t illegal to buy human bones in Denmark, Kai’s adopted homeland. He purchased his when the medical department got rid of them in favour of plastic casts. “I got a skull and a couple of bones” he says. “In Christian culture, when you’re dead, you have to be buried and that’s it. In other cultures skulls get remade into sacred drums, or bones are carved into ornaments. That’s the way to deal with one of the most important aspects of life: death.”
On one hand, it’s a disappointingly mundane answer. On the other. well, how many bands use forearm bones for drumsticks and skulls for percussion?
The correct answer is: just the one, and that’s Heilung.
