Changes: What Can You Do with Nothing?

What Can You Do with Nothing?
publishing date	August 30, 2012
interviewer	Doron Davidson-Vidavski
publisher	'Notion Magazine
photography	iamamiwhoami: John Strandh
interviews chronology
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Revision as of 17:31, 14 September 2012

Interview

The mysterious iamamiwhoami is a sublime marriage of electro-pop fireworks and rich, confounding video. Doron Davidson-Vidavski is granted a rare interview with its created, Nordic musician Jonna Lee; it
is illustrated by an exclusive photoshoot allusively enriching the iamamiwhoami story, to be poured over by the project's obsessive fans.

What lies at the heart of the iamamiwhoami phenomenon, and its notable ability to keep its audience so continuously beguiled by its output, can be summarised as ‘reciprocal thirst’: on the one hand, the thirst of the enterprise’s dramatis personae to do something creatively fulfilling, loyally mirrored by the unquenchable thirst of the audio-visual saga’s followers for more music and more magical cinematography. Never before has a new act devised such a rich, well-rounded multi-media treasure hunt, backed by an ongoing story arc that so instantly engaged its audience and simultaneously tapped into their pop sensibilities.

“The evolution of iamamiwhoami has been a slow one”, says Swedish singer-songwriter, Jonna Lee, who was only officially confirmed by her management as the driving force behind this mysterious and intriguing project in June this year. “In terms of real thoughts that give some kind of conclusion, I would say that it started during the first part of 2009. The shape and details of the project weren’t developed. It was more thoughts of wanting to do music that tickled something inside me and leave things that I wasn’t happy with at the time”, Lee recalls. We are at her hotel in West London for one of only a handful of interviews she has agreed to give since the inception of iamamiwhoami over two and a half years ago.

“I wanted to find a counterpart for my music, visually”, she continues. “And do something where there was no creative limitation, so that even if there were only little means or no means at all, there would still be a freedom to do whatever kept us interested. This was just something I needed to do without knowing why I needed it at the time”.

The public’s first encounter with iamamiwhoami came in December 2009, with the fortnightly emergence of a perplexing and increasingly graphic series of YouTube videos. These cryptic teasers proved to be an instant hook: they immediately went viral and got people speculating as to who was behind them (Christina Aguilera was the firm favourite) and what their imagery symbolised. By the time the word ‘mandragora’ was identified in the alphanumeric title of the fourth viral, it was clear that the visuals concerned a mandrake – or, a plant blossoming in human form.

From March 2010 onwards, every few weeks saw the release of a full ‘single’ with an accompanying film, the title of each being an alphabetic letter, building up to the word ‘bounty’. The mostly instrumental musical backdrop of the teaser videos now graduated to fully vocal-led songs of such well-crafted brilliance that ‘o’, ‘t’ and ‘y’ can proudly call themselves three of the very best singles of that year.

“I can say that the ‘bounty’ series very much reflects different stereotypes of the woman. That is a good key to how I see it”, Lee reveals. I then ask what came first for ‘bounty’: the mandrake plot or the music? “The music is at the core of this project and that is how it’s been built. Once there was a song then there would come a collaboration between me and the visual director and that’s how the merging of the two would happen, giving it a sync. The stories come after, based on the lyrics as scripts for the visuals”.

I wonder about the thematic ideas underlying the storyline. Lee is hesitant. “Speaking too much of the process, I think, removes a bit of the magic, you know?”, she says. “I need to leave something for everyone to imagine for themselves. I have my vision. I think it is quite clear sometimes. And sometimes it’s less clear and I like that”.

And who exactly is iamamiwhoami? “It’s an entity, I guess. It’s me in collaboration with amazing people that I love”, she says. As for the provenance of the name, Lee explains: “It started as a name of something that you can’t touch and you don’t know what it is. The name reflects that, I think. We weren’t an act when it started… It was more of a, how to say it…” Here, she pauses, searching for the English word. Struggling, she smiles and offers the Swedish word, ‘väsen’, instead. It means ‘an essence’. “It was something you couldn’t touch. Something abstract. A way of bringing our idea into the world. Once the first release, ‘b’, was out, it was definitely the name we chose for the act but not before that”. Incidentally, she pronounces the name: I am – am I - who am I.

Our conversation then touches on the project’s funding. “Part of the challenge was to see: what can we do with nothing? And that’s literally what we did”, she says. “There was borrowing of gear, both on the music and visual side, but we have used tools that anyone could use to create things so that’s what has kept me so inspired all the time”. What they have created with relatively little means must make her very proud, then. “Yes, I am very proud of all of us and also thankful for the help we have had from friends that have been inspired enough to help us. I feel very lucky to be able to do something where I am extremely passionate and I don’t separate myself from my work. It’s something that has a real life and it doesn’t end when I go home in the evening. It’s quite amazing”.

As iamamiwhoami regularly interacts with its followers (and always in a unique manner), I ask Lee whether she ever reads fan comments about the project. “I think it’s safe to say that we hear people, meaning the audience that are following us and have been from the beginning… their voices always surface somehow, you know? A communication happened between the project and the audience that was unique and that has shaped it and that, to me, is very valuable”, she says. “I think we’re blessed with people that are thinking and who are truly interested”.

That communication reached a new level when, in November 2010, iamamiwhoami streamed a live concert filmed in a Swedish field online. Weeks earlier, Lee and her coconspirators had asked fans to nominate one of their number to take part in the event. During the concert, it was made to appear as though the selected fan was being burnt alive inside a cardboard box. I ask Lee what the fan’s role in the concert was. “His role was representing the audience and he bravely travelled without knowing where he was going, may he rest in peace”, she replies with a tiny smile. “And I can tell you that he was there to interact and to set an example”.

We turn to what stimulates Lee’s creative process and I ask whether there is any musician from whom she draws inspiration. “There are so many, of course”, she nods. “I guess all artists have their role models. I had mine when I was still searching for my way and when [the iamamiwhoami project] happened there was kind of… well, the inspiration came from itself, it sort of fed itself, you know? And then I started realising what it would sound like. So, after a while, the main focus was just to keep finding the core of that. And that is what inspires me. I don’t know if that’s how everybody works but I really like that feeling because it grows to be its own bubble”.

iamamiwhoami’s latest journey and the motivation for Lee’s opening herself to interviews is ‘kin’, an audio-visual story in nine chapters and the closest that iamamiwhoami has come to releasing a straightforward album. This record acts as further demonstration of Lee’s intricate song-writing and, as usual, the visuals for the tracks are engrossing as they are confusing.

Lee explains that the process for “growing ‘kin’”, as she puts it, started straight after iamamiwhoami’s first show before an audience, at last year’s Way Out West festival. “When we began sharing ‘kin’ I was still working on ‘kin’. That’s how real-time our work is”, she says. I ask her what the first song she wrote for ‘kin’ was and, after a pause, she tells me it was ‘sever’, the album’s opener. ‘sever’ is a beautiful slice of electro-sombreness which, in its final minute, erupts into fireworks of synths and harmonies. It’s a dramatic introduction to a record full of stunning melodies, quirky arrangements and moody crescendos.

What about the protagonist in ‘kin’ ? Is she the same character who appears in the ‘bounty’ series? “You’re following the same woman throughout all our work from the beginning”, Lee confirms.

In the video for the track ‘goods’ , Lee is seen dancing inside a black box – impliedly, the same box she lovingly holds in the album’s publicity shots. I ask her what the meaning of the box is. “It is our kin, you know? It was conceived through our meeting with the audience at the [Way Out West] show. It is a symbol for this encounter with the audience and it’s also a symbol of the shape that we needed ‘kin’ to be in, to be able to deliver it in a way that people could embrace”.

And where does the story go from here? “I must deliver ‘kin’ and once it’s out of my system, that’s when a new process usually begins”, Lee says. “I’m that woman so we’ll have to see what will happen to me and, throughout this, anything can happen”.

iamamiwhoami’s lyrics often make reference to the inter-dependence of the entity and its followers on one another. It’s that reciprocal thirst again. On a track challengingly titled ‘.’ which was debuted at the end of 2010’s online concert, Lee sings: “Mass confusion; never been so damn excited”. This line seems to sum up the project perfectly - as our meeting comes to an end, I realise that I am pretty much still confused. Conversely, Lee’s secrecy about the project and the ideas behind it helps make sense of the role of that confusion in the experience: I, for one, have never been so damn excited.

Changes: What Can You Do with Nothing?

Revision as of 17:31, 14 September 2012

Contents

Interview

Photos

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@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 |next=[[Every Event in Our Storyline Has a Purpose|DIY: Every Event in Our Storyline Has a Purpose]]
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+==Interview==
+: ''The mysterious iamamiwhoami is a sublime marriage of electro-pop fireworks and rich, confounding video. Doron Davidson-Vidavski is granted a rare interview with its created, Nordic musician Jonna Lee; it<br />is illustrated by an exclusive photoshoot allusively enriching the iamamiwhoami story, to be poured over by the project's obsessive fans.''
+What lies at the heart of the iamamiwhoami phenomenon, and its notable ability to keep its audience so continuously beguiled by its output, can be summarised as ‘reciprocal thirst’: on the one hand, the thirst of the enterprise’s dramatis personae to do something creatively fulfilling, loyally mirrored by the unquenchable thirst of the audio-visual saga’s followers for more music and more magical cinematography. Never before has a new act devised such a rich, well-rounded multi-media treasure hunt, backed by an ongoing story arc that so instantly engaged its audience and simultaneously tapped into their pop sensibilities.
+“The evolution of iamamiwhoami has been a slow one”, says Swedish singer-songwriter, Jonna Lee, who was only officially confirmed by her management as the driving force behind this mysterious and intriguing project in June this year. “In terms of real thoughts that give some kind of conclusion, I would say that it started during the first part of 2009. The shape and details of the project weren’t developed. It was more thoughts of wanting to do music that tickled something inside me and leave things that I wasn’t happy with at the time”, Lee recalls. We are at her hotel in West London for one of only a handful of interviews she has agreed to give since the inception of iamamiwhoami over two and a half years ago.
-==Preview==
-“Part of the challenge was to see: what can we do with nothing? And that’s literally what we did. There was borrowing of gear, both on the music and visual side, but we have used tools that anyone could use…”
+“I wanted to find a counterpart for my music, visually”, she continues. “And do something where there was no creative limitation, so that even if there were only little means or no means at all, there would still be a freedom to do whatever kept us interested. This was just something I needed to do without knowing why I needed it at the time”.
-Nothing [[iamamiwhoami]] has created, to date, is unexciting. Shrouded in much secrecy and mystery, this audio-visual project, which went viral online at the end of 2009, has baffled, intrigued and inspired fans all over the world.
+The public’s first encounter with iamamiwhoami came in December 2009, with the fortnightly emergence of a perplexing and increasingly graphic series of YouTube videos. These cryptic teasers proved to be an instant hook: they immediately went viral and got people speculating as to who was behind them (Christina Aguilera was the firm favourite) and what their imagery symbolised. By the time the word ‘mandragora’ was identified in the alphanumeric title of the fourth viral, it was clear that the visuals concerned a mandrake – or, a plant blossoming in human form.
-Issue 059 of Notion Magazine brings you one of the only few interviews given by the project’s creator, [[Jonna Lee]], in support of iamamiwhoami’s new release, ‘[[kin]]’. It is accompanied by an eye-popping shoot for Notion presided over by photographer and iamamiwhoami co-conspirator, [[John Strandh]], in Sweden.
+From March 2010 onwards, every few weeks saw the release of a full ‘single’ with an accompanying film, the title of each being an alphabetic letter, building up to the word ‘bounty’. The mostly instrumental musical backdrop of the teaser videos now graduated to fully vocal-led songs of such well-crafted brilliance that ‘o’, ‘t’ and ‘y’ can proudly call themselves three of the very best singles of that year.
-Here’s an exclusive sneak-peek at one of the images created by Jonna herself from our feature to tide you over until our September issue is out on August 30th, or you can pre-order your copy here.
+“I can say that the ‘bounty’ series very much reflects different stereotypes of the woman. That is a good key to how I see it”, Lee reveals. I then ask what came first for ‘bounty’: the mandrake plot or the music? “The music is at the core of this project and that is how it’s been built. Once there was a song then there would come a collaboration between me and the visual director and that’s how the merging of the two would happen, giving it a sync. The stories come after, based on the lyrics as scripts for the visuals”.
+I wonder about the thematic ideas underlying the storyline. Lee is hesitant. “Speaking too much of the process, I think, removes a bit of the magic, you know?”, she says. “I need to leave something for everyone to imagine for themselves. I have my vision. I think it is quite clear sometimes. And sometimes it’s less clear and I like that”.
+And who exactly is iamamiwhoami? “It’s an entity, I guess. It’s me in collaboration with amazing people that I love”, she says. As for the provenance of the name, Lee explains: “It started as a name of something that you can’t touch and you don’t know what it is. The name reflects that, I think. We weren’t an act when it started… It was more of a, how to say it…” Here, she pauses, searching for the English word. Struggling, she smiles and offers the Swedish word, ‘väsen’, instead. It means ‘an essence’. “It was something you couldn’t touch. Something abstract. A way of bringing our idea into the world. Once the first release, ‘b’, was out, it was definitely the name we chose for the act but not before that”. Incidentally, she pronounces the name: I am – am I - who am I.
+Our conversation then touches on the project’s funding. “Part of the challenge was to see: what can we do with nothing? And that’s literally what we did”, she says. “There was borrowing of gear, both on the music and visual side, but we have used tools that anyone could use to create things so that’s what has kept me so inspired all the time”. What they have created with relatively little means must make her very proud, then. “Yes, I am very proud of all of us and also thankful for the help we have had from friends that have been inspired enough to help us. I feel very lucky to be able to do something where I am extremely passionate and I don’t separate myself from my work. It’s something that has a real life and it doesn’t end when I go home in the evening. It’s quite amazing”.
+As iamamiwhoami regularly interacts with its followers (and always in a unique manner), I ask Lee whether she ever reads fan comments about the project. “I think it’s safe to say that we hear people, meaning the audience that are following us and have been from the beginning… their voices always surface somehow, you know? A communication happened between the project and the audience that was unique and that has shaped it and that, to me, is very valuable”, she says. “I think we’re blessed with people that are thinking and who are truly interested”.
+That communication reached a new level when, in November 2010, iamamiwhoami streamed a live concert filmed in a Swedish field online. Weeks earlier, Lee and her coconspirators had asked fans to nominate one of their number to take part in the event. During the concert, it was made to appear as though the selected fan was being burnt alive inside a cardboard box. I ask Lee what the fan’s role in the concert was. “His role was representing the audience and he bravely travelled without knowing where he was going, may he rest in peace”, she replies with a tiny smile. “And I can tell you that he was there to interact and to set an example”.
+We turn to what stimulates Lee’s creative process and I ask whether there is any musician from whom she draws inspiration. “There are so many, of course”, she nods. “I guess all artists have their role models. I had mine when I was still searching for my way and when [the iamamiwhoami project] happened there was kind of… well, the inspiration came from itself, it sort of fed itself, you know? And then I started realising what it would sound like. So, after a while, the main focus was just to keep finding the core of that. And that is what inspires me. I don’t know if that’s how everybody works but I really like that feeling because it grows to be its own bubble”.
+iamamiwhoami’s latest journey and the motivation for Lee’s opening herself to interviews is ‘kin’, an audio-visual story in nine chapters and the closest that iamamiwhoami has come to releasing a straightforward album. This record acts as further demonstration of Lee’s intricate song-writing and, as usual, the visuals for the tracks are engrossing as they are confusing.
+Lee explains that the process for “growing ‘kin’”, as she puts it, started straight after iamamiwhoami’s first show before an audience, at last year’s Way Out West festival. “When we began sharing ‘kin’ I was still working on ‘kin’. That’s how real-time our work is”, she says. I ask her what the first song she wrote for ‘kin’ was and, after a pause, she tells me it was ‘sever’, the album’s opener. ‘sever’ is a beautiful slice of electro-sombreness which, in its final minute, erupts into fireworks of synths and harmonies. It’s a dramatic introduction to a record full of stunning melodies, quirky arrangements and moody crescendos.
+What about the protagonist in ‘kin’ ? Is she the same character who appears in the ‘bounty’ series? “You’re following the same woman throughout all our work from the beginning”, Lee confirms.
+In the video for the track ‘goods’ , Lee is seen dancing inside a black box – impliedly, the same box she lovingly holds in the album’s publicity shots. I ask her what the meaning of the box is. “It is our kin, you know? It was conceived through our meeting with the audience at the [Way Out West] show. It is a symbol for this encounter with the audience and it’s also a symbol of the shape that we needed ‘kin’ to be in, to be able to deliver it in a way that people could embrace”.
+And where does the story go from here? “I must deliver ‘kin’ and once it’s out of my system, that’s when a new process usually begins”, Lee says. “I’m that woman so we’ll have to see what will happen to me and, throughout this, anything can happen”.
+iamamiwhoami’s lyrics often make reference to the inter-dependence of the entity and its followers on one another. It’s that reciprocal thirst again. On a track challengingly titled ‘.’ which was debuted at the end of 2010’s online concert, Lee sings: “Mass confusion; never been so damn excited”. This line seems to sum up the project perfectly - as our meeting comes to an end, I realise that I am pretty much still confused. Conversely, Lee’s secrecy about the project and the ideas behind it helps make sense of the role of that confusion in the experience: I, for one, have never been so damn excited.
 ==Photos==