iamamiwhoami - Blue

Despite the Queen Bee’s insistence otherwise, ‘Beyoncé’ is definitely not the first audiovisual album in the world. In fact it’s a format Jonna Lee’s project iamamiwhoami has been pushing forward with since 2009, in collaboration with her long-term producer Claes Björklund. An all-encompassing undertaking, iamamiwhoami spans music, visuals, and performance. It’s obsessively conceptual, too, to the point of being slightly overwhelming.

Like pretty much everything else iamamiwhoami put their minds to, the Swedish project’s third full-length, ‘BLUE’ is best viewed as a complete package, in context with the rest of the outfit’s output. The visual narrative continues from the last release ‘kin’ - and it moves away from the project’s surreal leanings towards a clean and slightly detached form of glacial electronica. The imagery surrounding this latest release is aqueous and spurting; fountains of creativity and mineral sources overflowing with Scandinavian electronic pop, and there’s no doubt that ‘BLUE’s element of choice is ice-cold, glassy, water.

iamamiwhoami have always been a project that favours a cloak of dark, slightly macabre mystery over any other costume. This latest release sees Jonna Lee increasingly stepping out of the shadows into lighter, more uplifting territory. ‘BLUE’s watery explorations demonstrate an intriguing new facet to the project, but it might well come at the expense of the fearsome impact that earlier releases packed in the shedload.