recorded in a
fixed medium.
Many times the question of exactly which event
should qualify as the moment of discovery
is difficult to answer.
One of the most famous examples of this is
the question of the discovery of oxygen.
While Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley
were able to concentrate oxygen in the laboratory
and characterize its properties, they did
not recognize it as a component of air.
Priestly actually thought it was missing a
hypothetical component of air, known as phlogiston,
which air was supposed to absorb from materials
that are being burned.
It was only several years later that Antoine
Lavoisier first conceived of the modern notion
of oxygen — as a substance that is consumed
from the air in the processes of burning and
respiration.
By the late 20th Century, scientific research
has become a large-scale effort, largely accomplished
in institutional teams.
The amount and frequency ofdelivered in a voice that ranges from an ethereal croon to a slightly cracked warble.

Perfume Genius is a strangely perfect name for Mike Hadreas' music. Like scent, his songs are delicate but strong, faint yet persistent, and have a deep, almost inexplicable emotional pull. On his debut album, Learning, Hadreas comes across like the kid brother of Antony Hegarty or Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart, taking the vulnerability of a singer/songwriter to an extreme with messed-up and heartbreaking stories.

Learning, the debut outing by Perfume Genius, is a rare paradox: an album that is swimming in its creator’s compelling back story and yet seems to have sprung out of nowhere. By now, anyone who has heard the record has undoubtedly been intrigued enough to seek out the biographical details of