蜜芽传媒

Russian duo iamthemorning's unique sound is a cross between prog rock and classical chamber music. Their unflinching album of songs about mental illness, Lighthouse, has won them album of the year at The Progressive Music Awards 2016 in London.

Formed in 2010 in St Petersburg, iamthemorning are singer Marjana Semkina and multi-instrumentalist Gleb Kolyadin. Featuring a story of the progression of mental illness, their third album Lighthouse takes the listener through the stages with the story鈥檚 central character, her attempts to fight it, temporary remission leading to a final breakdown.

Songwriter Marjana was inspired by the works and lives of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath - and a day trip to the cliffs at Beachy Head, on England's South coast. She says the album is "not particularly easy listening" but she wanted to put the spotlight on mental illness, a subject that's so often avoided. She says music helped her in dark moments of her own life and wanted create something to help others who might be suffering themselves.

All the songs are sung in English, something that Marjana feels has led to the band being ignored in their own homeland. She reveals that she's never written a song in Russian - "it's a tough language to write in". She says that singing such lyrically dark songs in her mother-tongue would be too hard, it would be "like turning my soul inside out".

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