Interview / iamamiwhoami
Your lyrics talk about going through some kind of metamorphosis, coming out of your shell and discovering and accepting a new side of yourself, feeling liberated. Do you think that’s why you attract such a gay audience? I never really thought about it, but it feels natural. I’ve definitely gone through a metamorphosis, and I think it’s wonderful that the audience can relate to that. Having the courage to explore yourself and go through something and come out as something else, I think everyone goes through that at some point in their life, no matter if you’re gay or not. The world has been very overwhelming these past couple of years and I think it’s been beautiful that people can relate to our work. [Communication seems to be an important part of the iamamiwhoami – that’s: i am, am i, who am i? – project. Aside from the songs and videos, communication is very sparse. There is no Twitter account, there are no TV appearances. The answers to the very rst iamamiwhoami interview were comprised of song lyrics, and very gradually the interviews have become a bit more open but they’re still very rare.]
How do you decide what the line is between letting the work represent itself, and explaining some of it through interviews? I just go with my feeling, and the value I put on the work we do. It also depends on who I speak to, to be honest. Sometimes it feels natural to explain, when I know that the person who is interviewing me has an understanding of the work. It’s like any other conversation. My main focus is to not let anything get in the way of the work. Sometimes the questions lead to totally different things and then I just feel like I don’t need to dignify them with an answer that would detract from the music of the videos or the actual project and what it has become. There are so much more interesting things to talk about. [In November 2010, YouTube user ShootUpTheStation was selected by a group of fans to represent them and y to Sweden. He waited in a hotel room, got a quick lesson on how to waltz and was eventually picked up by Lee and taken to a forest. There, she performed several songs before asking him to lie down in a cardboard box, which was taped up and brought to a stack of more cardboard boxes, which was then set
on re. The entire concert was webcast online and you can still check it out on YouTube. While presumably Lee didn’t actually kill a fan ‘for the sake of art’, ShootUpTheStation hasn’t been heard from since.]
The material on Bounty is now over two years old. How has it evolved since you rst created it? We’ve never played those songs live, except for the concert we did in a forest, that was broadcast on the internet. We did some slightly different versions of the Bounty songs there. Now we’re trying to play them live as they were created, because we never had that moment with the songs back when we first created them. We did a song and the video, one episode at a time, in real time, because we didn’t have a set of already made songs and videos that were done. So when we released [the first song] ‘B’, it took a month after that to create the second song ‘O’, and we released it as soon as we were done. So we didn’t have the time to stop and think about it. As a band or as a project, we weren’t ready to go on tour and do that kind of concerts. That’s why In Concert [the concert held for ShootUpTheStation] was made, because it was worthy of a new kind of appearance that integrated the digital world with the physical world, in a way that felt right. Was In Concert heavily rehearsed? We did maybe one run-through so all the people working on it knew what was going to happen. But we didn’t know what he was going to be like, or if he was going to be afraid. I knew he was young, and we hadn’t met him before. He waited in a hotel room for a very long time before we went to pick him up that night. And it all started from there. I was overwhelmed and quite scared, in a way, because I felt like I had made such an impact on him. I was afraid he was going to be in shock or something. But he managed, he was brave, and things went the way they went. And I was so proud of the way the audience selected a person to represent them, without any specific direction. They managed to find someone by voting, and they kind of became close as a team. So that was fascinating. Which part of the project are you most proud of? Every new event is such a great thing. Bounty was so intense, and we couldn’t really stop to think. We were in this bubble and just created. No one in Sweden really knew about us at the time, so we were quite free to do that. In 2011 we continued with ‘; john’ and ‘clump’ and started the process of creating Kin, which was a totally different way of working. In between was In Concert, which was a very close audience encounter. That’s a very special moment for us. But I’m so proud of every step that we can take, when we do
something that can reach people without feeling like your creative privacy is being invaded, that you can do things according to your creative values. So every moment is special, but they are special in so many different ways, I couldn’t really pick one. In Concert, however, is definitely a moment where I felt like I didn’t know what we were doing, but I felt that it was something extraordinary. During more recent concerts, you’ve played a song that has not been released yet, called ‘.’ – could you tell me more about it? It’s a song that we played during In Concert, at the end. It’s the funeral song, played on an organ in a field. We had never played it live until our show at Brixton in London at the end of May. We wanted to play it to the audience, because we thought it would be interesting. It’s kind of a theme for us, for Claes and me and the other collaborators we have. It was actually the first song that was ever written for the project. I know it has many names. How would you pronounce it yourself? ‘Punkt’. It’s a Swedish word. But I’ve heard a few different names for it. It was a bit of a risk for us to play it, because you never know if it’s going to have an impact on yourself, and if you can bring it to life, but I felt that it was great. After the Brixton show ended a new song was played over the speakers, which is not usually what artists do after a concert. Will it be part of the new album? Well, that’s interesting. There’s so much music that we have made. We have a little library that I keep and we bring it with us. I like to give an audience a very specific unique moment, that’s why we played it for them after the show. Sometimes those songs come out and get released, and sometimes they don’t. Of course I want to keep exploring what this is. I know we’ll continue with it, but I don’t know when it will be ready, or what it will sound like or look like. Right now, we’re finishing the concerts, to preserve the real-time situation, so to speak. We try to have a conversation with the audience through the work, but that can’t happen if there are other things happening at the same time. After the final shows this summer, we are going to sit down, have a breather and think. That doesn’t mean that it will take a long time to release new material, because we’ve done everything in very little time. So who knows?
TEXT: Martijn TUlp / PHOTOS: John Strandh
in a strange way. Not because I think it’s the greatest thing that humanity has seen, or to lift myself up to some weird degree, it’s just that I can now see and hear what should come next. So I don’t want to get inspired by anything else, because I want it to keep its own identity and not lose that. It’s so precious that it needs to be protected.
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