The record starts with
Just a room, a taste of what it’s to come, Mike’s voice makes beautiful utterances alongside a profound orchestration, marking the beginning of this journey, a score of things to come. This is a trip full of emotions in which Perfume Genius invites us to travel through brief hymns. The songs, despite being designed for the dance part of this project, are exquisite and capture the emotion of his singular style. It’s important to highlight the instrumental side of the album; they are not interludes. Especially Scherzo that maintains tautness and spills into
Ugly Season (the track) with slippery, greasy lyrics, leaving room for the ambivalence of sensuality, divinity, and grotesque.
Eye in the Wall brings warmth to this album and its percussion is a brilliant exercise in meter to maintain the suspense of a track.
Pop Song and
Photograph are probably the two songs closest to the Perfume Genius work we’re more familiar with. They still have this halo of innovation that is experimental even for him. The ravey
Hellbent sounds like a ritual in itself, there’s a trance-like experience almost like a climax that gives way to the outro of the record; Cenote. It’s the perfect song to listen to as if it were meditation at the end of a gym class but you should listen to it with headphones and holding hands with someone you love.
And there is more. As the dance piece couldn’t be performed during the pandemic, Hadreas offered the now-completed recordings up to
Jacolby Satterwhite, known for his immersive multidisciplinary technique that fuses live video and 3-D animation.
“My visual narrative serendipitously mirrors the lyrical direction in his music; it’s a rare, like-minded bond. It’s a creation myth. How do you architecturally mould and render an idealised version of utopia? It’s about making something that you desire so beyond your scope that it’s hard to grapple into a concrete form.” explains Satterwhite.
Pygmalion’s Ugly Season is the result, and it is a Pixar-esque dystopian gay graphic adventure where black and white vintage holograms dance and merge into the projection of both artists’ visual imaginary. There are beautiful moments in which the artist dancing alongside Tate Justas takes
Tom Galle’s VR Hug famous photography to a new level. The piece goes beyond the typical datamoshing and glitching our eyes are already accustomed to. The music blends entrancingly with the whole video, and what really ties both sides of the project together is the dancing. The work of the team of people involved in this extra sensorial project elevates it to museum display status.