John Maus is the subject of a new book by Adam Harper, Heaven Is Real: John Maus and the Truth of Pop.

A cult hero to many ever since the release of his 2006 debut LP Songs, Maus looks to be getting some much-deserved wider recognition for his latest, We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves. An academic by day, Maus has long posited himself as a kind of pop postmodernist, and his acutely self-aware musical output is certainly ripe for theorising.

Enter Adam Harper, a contributor to The Wire and the brains behind the acclaimed Rouge’s Foam blog. His next book, Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human-Making, is due to be published in November by Zero books, and rather grandly “proposes a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining musical modernism and music itself in the process.”

For Heaven Is Real, Harper has teamed up with the Precinct micro-press to create a 64pp perfect-bound edition. The text is based on a Rouge’s Foam blog entry he wrote and posted in 2009, which you can still read here. Says the publisher:

“John Maus is one of the most intriguing artists in the millennial wave of lo-fi pop, assembling his unique and intimate language from synth pop, disco, baroque classical and church music. Yet Maus’s work is much more than another exercise in retroist hybridity, and his overtures on truth and love are, upon further listening, no mere ironic posturing.

“Does Maus have something to teach us about arriving at the truth through personal musical expression, or is he on a doomed Romantic adventurer? Has he really discovered Heaven – and can he take us there?”

If you in any way agree, then visit Precinct’s site, where you can pre-order the book ahead of its July 28 publication.