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amamiwhoami is an anonymous electronic music project featuring a female lead singer, found in 2009. It was promoted through a viral campaign on YouTube. On 4 December 2009, a surreal clip less than a minute long appeared on YouTube submitted by iamamiwhoami. The clip was forwarded to several known blogger as well as music journalists. A second soon appeared and then a third. By then, Chris Cantalini and MTV writer James Montgomery picked up on the clips fueling speculation that had been building in blogs.
The case
To date, iamamiwhoami has released nine videos, varying from short to quite long; the first six videos featuring a provocative slime-covered girl and, as Montgomery says, "a dendrophiliac’s wet dream, loaded with images of a mud-smeared woman licking a tree and some strangely sexualized sap."
The music is a compelling mix of electronic, alternative rock and experimental music though the woman's voice is distorted and or muted at points in each video. They are believed to be part of a viral marketing campaign. The seventh video features a woman covered in plastic from head to toe playing the electric organ, the eighth shows a woman in a greenhouse singing with an Elizabethan collar around her neck, while the ninth shows a man with a singing puppet.
The clues
The first six videos are titled with a series of numbers. When indexed into the alphabet, these spell out words such as "educational", "I am", "its me", "mandragora", "officinarum" and "welcome home". Mandragora officinarum is the mandrake root, particularly when used for psychedelic purposes.
Each of the first six clips closes with a drawing of an animal– a goat, an owl, a whale, a bee, a llama, and a monkey. After previously blogging about the anonymous clips MTV writer James Montgomery received a package by messenger with a lock of blond hair, a piece of bark, and a pictogram of the six animals with the question "says what?", it is however, still unproven that the sender of the package is the same as the person behind the clips.
Furthering the mystery; the sixth clip ends with the woman in the video whispering "Why" or "Y".
The seventh clip was posted without the mysterious coded numbers as previous clips were and is instead simply titled "b". This video features a woman wrapped in plastic, watched over by three men. Unlike the others, it does not include an animal illustration at the end or a numeric code though there is a cat, or possibly six cats, in the video.
The eighth video, at 6:52, is the longest video to date, and is the video for the single "o". It features (presumably) the same woman as in "b" who this time has slightly shorter white eyelashes and is singing in what appears to be a greenhouse with an Elizabethan collar around her neck. This video follows the trend from "b" and does not have a numeric code or animal illustration, but seems to take place in the same style of house as the last video and has 6 cats, strawberries and what looks like 6 black faces.
The ninth video, entitled "u-1", shows a man running through a forest towards a cardboard-like fort, and a man (presumably the same one) with a puppet in the same cabin as "b" and "o"; in the beginning she says "a quién le corresponda", Spanish for "to whom it may concern" which has been part of the artwork of all single downloads. |
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