Knife Magazine

As previously featured on Knife Mag, we are excited once again to welcome Danish group Bona Fide, with a new video premiere as well as an in-depth conversation between frontwoman Sofia Luna and art director Olivia Danielsson, about the visual aesthetics behind the project.

The new single 'Alchemist' is taken off of their recently released debut album YIELD on Escho and, in the words of the group, deals with devotion, magic, and claustrophobia all at once.

OD: What is the idea behind the dresses? Did you intentionally make them for Bona Fide or how did it come about?

SL:I always really liked to dress up. When I started at the academy (the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts), I began thinking of this practice more as a way of building a character.

I'm really interested in the relations we have with things and objects. How they evoke feelings and how we communicate with them, especially through the intimate architecture of clothing.

I made these dresses as a kind of research - at the same time trying getting to know a special way of crafting clothes as well as knowing Bona better as a character. Could she be wearing this? What does that tell us about her? When is her time? Turns out she’s a contemporary time traveler if that makes sense?

OD: It reminds me of the expression ‘klæder skaber folk’ - I guess that translates into ‘clothes make the woman’ in this case. So does Bona come alive through the dresses?

SL:Yes! Very much so. Or, she’s always there, but her manifestation becomes much clearer wearing those dresses.

OD: Whenever I enter your apartment I always feel like opening the door to another world. You mentioned Bona as being a time traveler. Where does she go?

SL:It’s all about creating a world. I usually describe our songs as rooms to enter. The dresses are another dimension of this. They are very moody, some of them are extremely comfortable, some are very structured. Bona is often on the prairie, riffle in hand - but then suddenly she’s in some castle tower, where the curtains are fluttering, and the candle lights flicker. She’s in a convent garden in 1104, and then she drives a car into the sunset. So she’s very... versatile? There’s always this certain feeling.

OD: Sometimes I imagine Bona sitting in an empty saloon wearing her dress and her boots. Are the dresses created or assigned to a certain room or song? Or is it more fluid? Can you elaborate on this?

SL: As I said earlier, I think of the songs as rooms, emotional associative rooms. Some of the places, the saloon, for example, are closely linked to certain songs. But it’s all very fluid since they all create this one world where Bona lives. I imagine it as some kind of a loop where the mood creates the song, which creates the dress, etc.

SL:Absolutely. Everything is intertwined which I think makes it hard to separate the two of you. The way I see it, Bona Fida is a character that is a big part of you, but she's also floating in a parallel universe. How well do you know her?

SL:She teaches me a lot. She is this clear-cut version of my desires creating a space where my hurts are allowed to dwell. She knows how to handle anger. It is flaming and dignified with her. She’s like a lens I use on my life, she is this framing that chops out all that’s irrelevant, so you're able to focus. So In this sense, I know her quite well, and that's because I am her main building material. But at the same time, I think I’ll never truly know her, because she, as you say, inhabits a different realm, and she tells me what she sees in there. And one of the ways she tells me that is through the dresses, they’re like descriptions of her own world. And then the songs of course.

'Yield' is available now and can be ordered via Bandcamp. Remember to support your local artists and labels at this given time and stay safe out there.