I had all but given up on this blog after a brutal round of finals and a winter break full of hospital visits, but after watching these videos I am sufficiently inspired to give it another go.

iamamiwhoami is the best thing I’ve seen in years. Take the Knife, Bjork, and Roisin Murphy, and give them all a whopping dose of the hallucinogenic mandrake root, and this is what they might come up with.

The videos are totally mesmerizing. Even calling them videos doesn’t really do them justice, they’re really wonderfully imaginative short films, each with it’s own little mysteries, but when you watch them all in the right order, you find that one picks up where the other left off so you really have an album completely integrated with this incredibly rich work of art.

I recommend watching a couple of the videos (my favorites are t and ; john, above) until the OMG WTF feeling becomes overwhelming, then reading the wiki article to shed a little light on things. For instance,

Imagery associated with the folklore of the mandragora (the flowering humanoid, berries, dogs used to pull out the mandrake, and semen of a hanged man) recurs throughout iamamiwhoami’s videos. The seven videos in the letter series use the onomatopoeia of the calls of six animals (a goat, owl, whale, bee, llama, and monkey) in the drawings of the numbers series to approximate the english word “bounty.”

So try watching them in that order (b, o, u-1, u-2, n, t, y) and have your mind blown by the vision it took to create such an innovative masterpiece. Then, next time you have an hour, watch the concert, which includes an extra song (at around 0:55). And if you must watch only one, make it y:

THEN, get even more excited, because if (like me) you’re just catching up now, you’ll be delighted to know that the latest mystery from iamamiwhoami is still unfolding. Their first audio-visual album, kin, will be released on June 11, 2012, but they’ve been releasing videos for the new songs for months. The latest, play, was posted yesterday. I can’t wait to see where this is headed.

Pure magic.

For more info, fan art, and even some analysis of the symbolism in the videos, check out this tumblr.