Earlier this year, Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) released a stellar new album, the fifth in his repertoire, called Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. Now he's also set to release a new book that serves as a companion to the record.
The limited-edition 80-page hardcover book, called Immediately, is set to feature a handful of behind-the-scenes snippets regarding the release, including hand-written lyrics and collages from Hadreas and photography from French photographer Camille Vivier (including a number of breathtaking portraits), among other items. As described via the book's publisher, Hat & Beard Press, the book "reveals the unseen procedures beneath the music — vivid conjurings that became songs and tactile byproducts from exercises in world-building."
In the foreword, poet/fiction writer (as well as MacArthur Fellow) Ocean Vuong writes:
Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.
Below, you can view a few sneak peeks into the book's content, including some of the beautiful imagery it will contain. You can also purchase it here.
In other news, you can catch Perfume Genius from the comfort of your own home this weekend, as he'll be doing doing two livestreams on Saturday, September 19. The first takes place at 3 PM EST from The Palace Theater in LA, where Hadreas will perform alongside a 6 piece band and a string quartet. He then also does a solo acoustic performance at 4:30 PM ET the same day. Tickets are on sale, and ticketholders can rewatch through Sunday (9/20) at midnight Pacific (3 AM ET).
Hadreas has been making a handful of virtual appearances lately; recently, he covered Leonard Cohen's "Bird on the Wire" during an appearance on KCRW's Morning Becomes.