Perfume Genius has released his new album Ugly Season. To coincide with the release of the album ,Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas ) teamed with renowned visual artist Jacolby Satterwhite for a 30 minute film featuring Hadreas and the music of Ugly Season.
Entitled Pygmalion’s Ugly Season, the film – both stunning and surreal – is out and available to view. A version of the film debuted at the Guggenheim Museum’s Young Collector’s Council Party on June 1st.
The ten songs that make up Ugly Season began as an accompaniment to Perfume Genius and choreographer Kate Wallich’s dance piece, The Sun Still Burns Here, which was commissioned by the Seattle Theatre Group and Mass MoCA and performed via residencies in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, and Boston throughout 2019.
The new songs include Just a Room, Herem, Teeth, Pop Song, Scherzo, Ugly Season, Eye in the Wall, Photograph, Hellbent and Cenote.
Hadreas developed all new music for the work, which was then refined and expanded upon separately in the studio with long-time partner Alan Wyffels and producer Blake Mills.
These sessions were collaborative in nature Hadreas said, describing the creative process behind the work.
“Some were ‘traditional’ songs that I took into the studio, while other pieces were born out of improvisations between Blake and I. Alan wrote Scherzo in its entirety,” Hadreas said.
With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, it was no longer possible to perform The Sun Still Burns Here in the spirit it was conceived. Hadreas offered the now-completed recordings up to Satterwhite, known for his immersive multidisciplinary technique that fuses live video and 3-D animation.
“I gave him free reign,” Hadreas said. “ We’re both the same age, I feel very aligned with Jacolby when it comes to taste and certain pop culture obsessions. There is also a spiritual harmony between us in the way we approach work and the similar energetic spaces we want to inhabit, realize and share.”
“Mike and I are both writing scripts,” explains Satterwhite. “ 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 mold and render an idealized 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.”
Ugly Season bookends a two-year period of intense creativity from Perfume Genius, which includes the full-length Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, that album’s remixed counterpart Immediately, the dance piece, and the subsequent film collaboration with Satterwhite.
Source: Media Release Remote Control Records
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