For Douglas Brown... a Portland guy, who's been waiting for me to write this for ages.... Ax.
I’m still recovering from the shock of Norne. The dirty green stickiness of it on
my wrist, the oils settling like a second skin a pungent, visceral gasp of
medicinal fog, dawn bark, mulch and a damp bone-touching thrill of poisoned
weather. There is an imagining of vaulted green ceilings, moss-covered and
ancient, canopies whispering in the dark. In dreams I wear a crown of woven
verdigris branches and leaves. All around me is the smell of crushed needles
rising from the forest floor like the bitterest smoke.
Did that grab you? I hope so. I am very
taken with Slumberhouse, a small artisan scent house based in Portland, Oregon.
I hesitate to call it perfume because I’m not sure it is. Scent design,
odiferous abstraction, olfactory drama? The notes create an emotive exploration
across skin and senses. There is a feral realism to the scents, constructed
with an Impressionist’s eye for effect and detail. When I first smelt them I
found it quite hard to imagine who these astonishing creations were aimed at,
so personal were the effects.
Slumberhouse was founded by Josh Lobb and a
small group of friends operating as a kind of creative collective. Slumberhouse
is now just Josh with the others going their separate ways over time. Self-taught and obsessive about every detail
of his creations, Josh has assembled one of the most enigmatic and forceful
collections of scents I have touched to skin in quite some time. His dislike of
top notes and singular pursuit of turbulent darkness really strikes a chord.
There is beautiful night and decay in the notes, the smell of fallen stones,
lichen-covered trees sinking silently into haunted expanses of forests. Shadows
flicker with lost souls and spirits call out in the spaces between notes. I
smell magic. Not the elven cringe of
Lord of the Rings, but the creeping rise of forest paganism, the sweeping
forces portrayed in Princes Mononoke. This may sound a little OTT, but when you
first start nosing Slumberhouse fragrances, the impact on the senses is pretty
damn forceful.
I sampled Norne, Jeke, Sova, Ore and Pear
& Olive. The line has been cut
over the last year or so due to cost of materials and the rising cost of
shipping. Josh has retained a core line of gripping aromas and while some
diehard fans have griped about the cost rise and the loss of Vikt, Mur, Rune, Grev and Verg etc; as a hinterland perfumer most people
admire the purifying of his processes.
I like the remaining core collection, for
me it highlights all that is weird and compulsive chez Slumberhouse – dankness,
irregularity, angst, a sense of saga and most of all a tremendous sense of
beauty found in dank and murk. There is a signature: smoke…. a sweet chewed
tobacco glow that rolls through the range, lending the fragrances a sense of
sacrifice, fumes offered up to the skies from willing skin. An echo of the very
beginnings of scent and perfume, per
fumum.. through smoke. Even the
malleable cocoa glitter of Ore has a passing
whiff of jazz age cigarette.
Josh played with synthetics and essential
oils in his early creations, searching for a means of olfactive expression to
suit his eclectic and curious nature. In several interviews he has mentioned not
wearing scent when he was younger. I think in many ways this was a big
advantage when it came to re-creating favoured odours and influences the Josh
Lobb way. Unencumbered by formal training or the expectations of what he should
be achieving and indeed producing, the hard-learned alchemical experimentation
has allowed Slumberhouse to grow in secret like a culture in a cracked petri-dish
in a forgotten lab. Until suddenly someone says, ‘Damn, this stuff works, it
smells like Norwegian Death metal played in darkness under a canopy of
shuddering pines’.
