Immediately

by Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas, Camille Vivier (Photography)

Immediately is the indispensable book companion to Perfume Genius’ (Mike Hadreas) critically-lauded album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, a "three-dimensional, dust-blown world that is cinematic in its grandeur and intimate in its inspection of the human form." [Pitchfork]

Featuring iconic portraits of the artist from celebrated French photographer Camille Vivier, this limited-edition monograph reveals the unseen procedures beneath the music—vivid conjurings that became songs and tactile byproducts from exercises in world-building.

Within its pages, beguiling still life is situated amid corroded collage, handwritten lyrics take shape, words emerge as emotionally-charged objects. The results are all collected here in a process made permanent.

In the book’s foreword, Ocean Vuong writes, “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.”

80 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2021

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“No sun hangs outside / Just borrowed light”, sings Mike Hadreas, better known as Perfume Genius, in Borrowed Light, from his album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately; just one lyrical fragment which also appears in a collaborative artbook, Immediately, by Perfume Genius and Camille Vivier, released late last year by Hat & Beard Press. Ocean Vuong pens the book’s foreword, in which he describes the body “sing[ing] itself into its future”, Hadreas’ work as “music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with.” Most of the book consists of a mix of handwritten and typed lyric scraps from his latest album, alongside gorgeous photographs shot for the album campaign by Camille Vivier. Vivier’s work smoulders perfectly, and somehow imbues even more appeal and charge into photos of Hadreas, posing with snakes, knives, motorcycles, in varying states of semi-dress, and the book is formatted to true perfection by Andrew J.S., whose design and AD work turns the book into something truly covetable, an artefact. Finally, the book concludes with a very brief Q&A between Hadreas and Vivier, in which Vivier mentions “not being overwhelmed by the technical aspect of photography, being able to make abstraction out of it without denying it.” A beautiful book by beautiful people. (Beauty not required of its readers.)