Toasting with a glass of champaign after unveiling the best music mystery of the past 9 months is the least Jonna could do yesterday night.
Ending dressed up as a Monkey surrounded by a group of wild beasts after a 4hour long rave party in the cold Swedish woods and an explicit audiovisual orgy was probably the best way to thank thousands of followers & to end the bounty dilemma.
With a bit of a delay Jonna Lee & a whole crew of creatures including the young German volunteer “ShootUpTheStation” managed to round off (not without trouble) a concert that must have been shot over the past few days. What at first seemed a live show into a car-concert journey to the Swedish Taiga (a paysage which let us say… has generated at least 50% of the magic & exoticism of the whole paraphernalia), quickly transpired into the most ambitious, pompous & extravagant clip of all the iamami series. Jonna Lee & her band had pre-recorded the hour long concert….
But we didn’t care, we were there completely dedicated to the best & most underground marketing machinery the Swedish musical industry has created this year.
Around 65min of glacial joy that we’re pretty sure most fans around the world savored to the last champagne swig. Sometimes too pop-diva with such a chameleonlike wardrobe, sometimes too sexually obvious with the rubbing & the touching, but an impeccable mise-en-scene.
New Swedish Pop
We may pay too much attention to the Swedish Pop here @aqnb, but we’re in deep love. Nothing new as Sweden has always be an extremely prolific country (& Scandinavia to be more generalist) when it comes to (good but also crappy) synth-pOp deliriums. Avner, Ceo (Tough Alliance), Air France, Jens Lekman, José González, The Knife…. a long list of artists who in most cases like to keep their mystical halo with mistrust.
To some points Mss Lee even sounded too Björk for our taste (a genetic coincidence?) especially while singing the complete version of “20101104” at the very end under her black chiffon veil, with a vocal fry. Comparisons are odious but since I stopped listening to Björk after her “Vespertine” album there was probably a deep lack within my being of a female Nordic musical extravaganza.
I think many of us have pretty much found it.
Social Support
We may never get to know the exact number of fans that joined the towhomitmayconcern.cc website directly or indirectly (through the iambounty.tk fan website). Lacking a twitter account, all the social attention, interaction & feeling flood was poured (and still is) on their facebook page as well as their youtube account. The facebook wall was opened to the fan expressionism where it was hard to keep up with all comments, likes & contradictory messages.
The truth is that despite only having roughly over 9000 facebook fans (admit that’s a moderate success… but for a Swedish band it shall be considered mainstream) there’s probably a good bunch who will buy her album if they haven’t already. Such a viral success has been translated at the same time into a fan-made dedicated youtube channel with the whole concert, as well as a torrent file, and loads of Jonna Lee dress-ups.
So is this it?
As the Strokes would ask. Yep, 10 months of cut & thrust that come to an end, or may be this is just the beginning of a new band…. or radical transformation for Jonna Lee & co (remember where she comes from & the type of music she used to flirt with…).
They had the means of course, it was only a matter of keeping the “extraterrestrial” spirit while giving the crowd a tasty hook. Now it’s a matter of making money & waiting until they give us a date for the “To Whom It May Concern” album that shall be released next year. At least, that’s what Jonna Lee’s Wikipedia page used to say, because she’s pulled it from the album’s list…. god knows why.
Who wants to be Mss Lee?
