This is the third and
final part of my 2014 olfactory harvest, I have included some of
most favourite scents of last year and finally my most beloved of
all: Foxglove by HYLNDS, my best of year. I'm not entirely sure why I am quite
so profoundly obsessed with it, but I am. It is perfume perfection. To me it
smells of melancholy, sex and soul woven with dexterity, élan and
erudition by David Moltz, one the most talented noses working in scented storytelling
today.
It was odd, assembling these recollections into
three parts. But it has provided me with a unique insight into how I
work and more importantly how I portray the odours I crave and obsess over
to all of you my lovely Foxy followers.
“We cross our bridges when we come to them
and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory
of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”
From Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead’ by Tom Stoppard
French Leather – Memo Fragrance
I wasn’t entirely
convinced by Memo’s French Leather at
first. The third volet in their
richly decorative Cuirs Nomades collection
was on initial acquaintance very different from the brutal, horse-beat of Irish Leather and the vanillic enormity
of Italian Leather, a scent I find
myself shockingly addicted to. I have been wearing Memo fragrances for years,
entranced by Memo co-founder Clara Molloy and perfumer Aliénor Massenet’s
translations of wistful wanderings. Towns, landscapes, mountain ranges, seas, quartiers and memories… frissons,
souvenirs: these are the essences of Memo(ory), subtle renderings of times and
places with gathered emotive materials. The
journey is the destination. This is the Memo way. I am happy to follow. Siwa and Lalibela are my fetish choices from the house. I return to them
again and again. The Cuirs Nomades
series broke new ground for Memo, yes the perfumes looked to locations (albeit
abstracted locales..) yet preoccupation with a single tenet and the density and
supple carnality of the formulations was fabulously at odds with the other
scents.
Irish Leather was a savage love letter to Clara’s Irish
husband John, an equine homage to saddlery and the wild Irish countryside. The
second was the laidback playboy sex of Italian
Leather which floods an ecstatic hide
note with a deluge of tonka-laced vanilla and an eerie tomato-leaf facet. So
when French Leather was announced I
wonder how that would roll; the mention of lime threw me slightly. In the
accompanying PR text for the launch was a cryptic phrase, describing the scent
as: a heroine’s modesty..a second skin..a
private journal.’ But as I sampled and wore it, this description began to
make sense, the notes writing themselves very discreetly, yet purposefully on
skin. There are distinctive echoes of Jean-Claude Ellena’s Kelly Calèche, I can’t get away from that, but his Barenia calf
extract and tuberose combo could often be suffocating and sinister. French Leather is an aloof portrait of
the conflicted Parisienne, alone in her world of applied and honed perfection,
a veil of carefully controlled desire between her and the urban world she
navigates with brittle, spike-heeled elegance. I have come to adore this truly
lovely scent, each time I wear it, I feel a little transported. The lime
essence and pink pepper in the opening of the scent echo the glitter of wet
pavements on Parisian spring mornings. My worries over the lime were unfounded,
it’s an adroit addition by Massenet, counterpointing the suede and glowing rose,
bitter kiss on floral leather, just delicious. Touches of cedar and juniper
freshen the mix and the drydown is as elegant as a sun-dappled stroll along the
Seine. French Leather is nowhere near
as dramatic and full on as the first two, but that was never really going to be
the case. This is a study of quiet ardour and sophistication, a perfume that
leaves enigmatic traces behind, a sense of special wonder. The beautiful work
continues at Memo. Will we get Russian Leather, something imperial and cold, or
perhaps Patagonian? Gaucho soft, cactus green and wind-scoured? We will see.
Yesterday Haze/A City on Fire
Imaginary
Authors
Josh Meyer. Where do
I start? He’s my perfume crush.. a geeky, Portland scented savant dreaming up
olfactory tomes of imaginary adventures for me to wear and obsess over. I own
so many now, he’s a divisive perfumer, you love his work or you don’t. I love
it, his style of atmospheric playfulness based his pungent scents on novels or
writing he has conjured up from Imaginary Authors just makes me warm and
thrilled to be scented. There is a great erudition at work in the assemblage of
ideas, images, timelines, graphics etc. Now the juice itself could easily have
played second fiddle to Josh’s blatantly fertile imagination, but the marriage
of olfaction to concept is canny and stylish. I’ve enjoyed nearly all of his
fragrance to date. I obsess over Cape
Heartache with its melancholy portrayal of mulchy trees dripping in webby
moss, the ground alive with wild strawberries glittering in morning dew. I love
the lonely flattened out asphalt accord in The
Cobra & the Canary, mixed with bitter, dry lemon, hay and sun-hot
tobacco, the story of two boys on the road to destruction.
In 2014 Josh released
two very different scents, a moody smouldering wonder with the fabulous title
of A City on Fire and Yesterday Haze, a love story of dust and
orchards, fig and lies. Both scents have outstanding presence on the skin,
telling the story of their notes with wit, clarity and just enough mystery to
further enslave the wearer. Yesterday
Haze is a dreamy wander of a perfume,
the addition of walnut bitters, iris and tree bark reinforce the sensation of
the novel’s heroine restlessly wandering orchards at night, wondering if she should
choose crop-duster lover or loyal farmer husband. I normally dislike fig so I was
delighted to find the note a little subverted, crushed underfoot in the orchard
grass, dusty and abandoned. The more I wear this strange fragrance, the more I
love it. Then at the tail end of the year came A City on Fire, a collaboration with Machus Menswear, a boutique in
Portland. Ostensibly inspired by an imagined graphic novel about Rupert, who makes
matches and Frances, who pens a dating column for a local paper (matchmaking..).
Together they witness a murder and find themselves involved in the darker, more
tenebrous elements of the city. The scent is both of them, dangerous,
explosive, troublesome… quick to spark. The keynote is cade oil or juniper tar
as it is sometimes referred to; a hugely powerful whoosh of heady reeking burn.
But Josh being Josh, always does things differently. This could have been just
smoke, burnt out buildings, torched cars, blackened drums. But he has added a
red berry facet through the burn, like handfuls of lipsticky haws exploding in
the heat. The sweet smoke is amazing and demonstrates Josh’s simmering
intelligence, wit and olfactory skill.
Myrrh Casati – Maison Mona di Orio
My final vaporous
entry is Myrrh Casati, a triumphant
and haunted release from Maison Mona di Orio, the first new scent to be created
for the house by a new perfumer since Mona’s death in December 2011 at the age
of 42. Mona’s partner and Creative Director of the house Jeroen Oude Sogtoen
has taken his time, carefully and beautifully controlling the release of work
since 2011. Rose Etoile de Hollande, Eau Absolue, and Violette Fumée, (created for him by Mona) have all appeared to
critical acclaim. But it was inevitable that a time would come when Jeroen
would have to recruit new talent to carry on the name of the house. This was
never going to be easy, the weight of expectation was enormous, from passionate
fans and the industry alike. Mona was the house muse, it revolved around her; she
was its luminescence. Then last year, Jeroen announced not only a new scent, Myrrh Casati, but also the return of two
of the older discontinued signature scents, Lux
and Nuit Noire. The re-boot would
also include new flacons by Ateliers Dinand, sensual, androgynous photography
and division of the oeuvre into three distinctive collections: Signature, Les Nombres d’Or and Monogram.
It was always going
to be hard to follow Mona; the Monogram collection will celebrate her style,
influences and traditions without attempting to recreate her golden, shifting
chiaroscuro style. Myrrh is one of those powerful and elusive notes that
wreathes the senses, a resin burned on altars, mingling with prayers twisting towards
gods and heavens. The perfumer Melanie Leroux has used layers of smoke,
illusion and veil to formulate an enigmatic yet defiantly sensual scent. I
smell mournful things, solitary rooms and abandoned possessions; I’m not sure
why, it a perplexing scent, with bold honeyed moments mixed with other more
unsettling shifts of rooty fumes and smudged urgency. There is always a sense
of mask and veil, of something underneath the notes.
Luisa, Marchesa di
Casati was a Italian noble woman who spent her entire life masked from reality
within a series of elaborately contrived personas, dramas, art pieces and
multiple lives. Yet she was extraordinary, blazing like a surreal, persuasive
flame, drawing people obsessively to her and repelling others in disgust. She
was both enigma and performer, benefactress and charlatan. She sat for a
remarkable array of painters and sculptors many of whom were seemingly ensnared
by her bizarre sexuality. She was truly gothic, obsessed with the macabre, the
dead and magic, her performances were
swathed in smoke, incense and a sense of genuine oddity and dread often using
elaborate settings, lighting, costumes, mirrors, music and scent, even weather
and live animals to achieve the effects she desired to perpetuate the Casati
myth.
Myrrh Casati is strong stuff, a rendering of the
Marchesa’s complex and divisive personality though smoke, transparency and
manifold mix of materials. I love the saffron and cardamom mingle in the middle
section, the touch of warm dark licquorice and swell of benzoin as the heady
medicinal notes of guaiac wood, incense and cypriol begin to flare in the base.
The myrrh is huge though, a shuddering banner held aloft in darkening sky. It
smells so beautiful; it takes your breath away. It takes quite some time to
fade, drifting into a sueded sweetness that lingers like dreamtime. It is a
different kind of Mona scent, but one I am glad we have, it proves the house is
vibrantly alive and somewhere Mona is smiling softly.
“We all wear masks, and the time comes when
we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.” André Berthiaume
Russian Tea/Tango – Masque Milano
Masque Milano were
my niche house of the year over at Cafleurebon, each of their beautifully
appointed fragrances preoccupied and delighted me in different ways. Delphine
Thierry’s Montecristo was the
fragrance that drew me dizzyingly into the Masque world of operatic illusion
and sensual excess. However it was the 2014 double whammy of Tango by Cécile Zarokian and Russian Tea by Julian Rasquinet that
really blew me away. I had already been aware of Masque because I had gone
looking for more work by Delphine Thierry after acquiring Cloon Keen’s
epicurean Castãna and Akaad and Galaad she made for Lubin. Her virtually flower-free Montecristo is a roaring beast of smoky
animalic excess. Radiating with faecal, pissy hyraceum, Thierry’s turbulent
essay in fumy sexuality binds animalism with styrax, rum, ambrette and a filthy
blaze of tobacco.
Masque Milano is
skincare and scent, founded and illuminated by Italian creative duo Alessandro
Brun and Riccardo Tedeschi. The guys have tremendous artistic skill and
imagination, building Masque around an operatic concept of life, love and
emotional environment set against a olfactory backdrop of imagined scenes and
acts composed by a handful of remarkable noses including Thierry, Zarokian,
Rasquinet and also Meo Fuiscini. Tango
by Cécile Zarokian is indeed a dance of dark, paranoid desire. The notes are
subversive and feel so wrong, dissonant and misplaced; the olfactory rhythm seems
off-kilter. And yet of course it is glorious, rose and jasmine, lifted and held
by the heat and glowing power of spices, balsams, tonka and a thrumming leather
accord. I loved the scent of decay it has. This sound totally nuts, but sniffing
it straight off skin, it’s as if you have found some forgotten bottle of
evaporated vintage scent, residue lying syrupy in the base of the flacon.
Fabulous!!
Russian Tea was a blind buy, a risky one as it had mint in it, not a
favourite Foxy note, but something made me have to have it. I was captivated by
the simplicity of the inspiration. A tea ritual in a tearoom overlooking the
frozen Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad, hot water poured over smoky black leaves
and shattered mint, the powerful diffusive brew sweetened raspberry preserve.
Alessandro and Riccardo handed this evocative idea to Julian Rasquinet who in
turn created a perfume of infinite complexity and slow turning beauty. Like
sweet smoke on ice-lashed days, Russian
Tea seems to inhabit the senses like a warm, redolent presence. There is a
honeyed ghostly heart of magnolia that flickers momentarily and is then consumed
by the baroque eagerness of the perfume’s glorious smoky swagger. I was
devoutly thrilled by the triptych of raspberry, mint and tea; it came together
so beautifully in the vaporous arms of Samovar dreams.
“By living a life “against nature,” the
deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.” Asti Hustvedt
Maai – Bogue
Profumo
I sample so much I
am rarely truly jolted by scents, but every now and again something enters my
environment that momentarily causes my senses to short and my skin to ripple,
shudder with unexpected pleasure. Vero Kern’s perfumes had that unique effect,
as did David Moltz’s gorgeous HYLNDS formulations. Then I found Bogue, an
esoteric and guarded Italian trove of aromas by architect and designer Antonio
Gardoni. There were three ready to wear scents, Eau d’E, Cologne Reloaded
and the claustrophobic sexually charged atmospherics of Maai, a perfume which kinda blew my mind. The scent of brothels and
abandoned caves, mouldering monasteries and vampiric bedchambers. Part of me
was horrified by my body’s overwhelming attraction to such a dank and animalic
reek, but then most of me just smiled, applied liberally and waited for the
world to end.
Antonio is someone
who needs to probes at edges and darkness. He is the founder of Studio AG, an
architecture and design studio based in Brescia, Italy, co-founder of Jump
Studios in London (with Ron Arad) and also a professor of industrial and
interior design in Brecia. Most of all he is fascinated it seems by personal
environment and how we inhabit it, either through physicality, objectivity and
olfaction. He is a deliberate and obsessive man, seeking finite detail in
everything he does. Bogue Profumo grew from the rooty discovery of a vintage assembly
of perfumer’s materials in a forgotten pharmacy basement. By blending these redolent
raw materials with contemporary techniques and adding ingredients such as
styrax, castoreum, lavender and citrus, Antonio created vaporous and
substantive variations of the original essences.
There is a feral,
defiant signature written boldly across the work that declares. I am unafraid of fear, olfaction is
subjective, skin is art. This is how I read Antonio’s extraordinary
formulae. Maai is an trangressive
work of art, arguably hardly perfume at all, instead something dangerous and
challenging to be carefully stored away in the crepuscular cupboard that houses
Andrea Maack’s undead Coven, Josh
Lobb’s sticky vampiric Norne for
Slumberhouse and Vero Kern’s bordello thigh porn chic, all aromas that flame my
often jaded senses.
Maai
smells both teeming and desolate, like a once busy town now abandoned to mildew
dust and memory. The rose and slovenly jasmine smell so incredibly rich and
full against a pissy green backdrop of obsessive tuberose. The bestiality and
power of Antonio’s ballsy assault on the chypré genre is magnificent. I smell
his buried oakmoss like a coded invitation to share in some private ritualistic
dare. Maai is one of those rare
concoctions that appears so very rarely, a brew of studied concentration and
desire. In its exquisite flacon and hand-cast fetish rubber top, it is a scent
for the brave and trangressive. I feel sublimely corrosive and sexy as its
notes flow over me. Ben fatto Signor Gardoni!
Foxy #1 – Foxglove by HYLNDS
I knew as soon as I
inhaled this singular juice off my skin, it would be my scent of 2014. I loved
so many things, but David Moltz’s Foxglove
electrified my senses and seized my heart with silvered and unequivocal skill.
Brooklyn-based David
and Kavi Moltz and started their lauded niche line D.S.& Durga in 2007,
working with small hand-finished batches of tonics and perfumed brews for
friends and family. David’s musicianship and Kavi’s architectural training fed
in and out of the burgeoning Brooklyn self-sufficiency, artisan movement of the
time, sweeping through food, furniture, coffee, beer, ceramics, chocolate and
of course scent. It may seem now seem arch and a tad hipster in retrospect, but
the importance of people creating, making;
realising personal visions of art and emphasising that pure craft could
communicate and also sell should never be underestimated. David is the juice
maker and Kavi looks after the design element of the lines. This is probably a
little simplistic though. They are a beautiful couple and obviously deliciously
in love with one another, so the creative process must be more instinctive and
symbiotic than a mere 50/50 division of labour.
I love the potency
and historical/artistic referencing of the Durga line, a number of their
fragrances sit in my study and I have a serious craving for Debaser, their latest launch, inspired
fabulously and darkly by the Pixies track. The PR stuff is adorned with the
macabre eye-slicing scene from Dali and Buñuel’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’. Way to get
a Fox’s attention.
But my heart belongs
I think to HYLNDS, David Moltz’s masterly collection of Celtic mythic
storytelling liqueurs that seem somehow to be painted and spellcast into their
bottles, ready to spray charm, magic, oddity and enigma onto stunned skin. They
smell somehow different; better is unfair, as the classic Durga line is
beautiful, the HYLNDS anthology does have a different texture and tone in its telling.
Using Manx, Angle, Norse, Irish and Scots myths and histories as a starting
point has allowed David to indulge his obsession for rare and precise raw
materials to reflect his intended olfactive visions. He has also visited the
places he has envisaged in his perfumes, walked the lands, inhaled the shifting
airs, handled soil, grasses and felt rain and mist on his adaptive skin. This
immersive approach demonstrates not only a commitment to his craft but also to
a pursuit of knowledge, understanding how the scented pieces assemble around
and inside us.
I have Spirit of the Glen in my collection,
David’s HYLNDS collaboration with the Glenlivet distillery in Speyside. Living
in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, you can’t avoid the importance of whisky
to the culture and economy of the country. It has proven over the years to be a
tricky note to elucidate in perfume; boozy is easy, the nuances of distillation
of rye, malt, location, peat etc, not quite as much. I do love Aqua Alba, Angela Flanders' wonderful
smoky, vanillic oud-tinted whisky scent, created with Jim Beveridge, Master
Blender at Johnny Walker, inspired by the Johnny Walker Black Label. More
recently, Harris Tweed announced an amazing new product, something they have
working on for ages, called The Fabric of
Flavour, a very unique technology, whereby the scent of Aqua Alba is microencapsulated through
the fabric in the finishing process. The scent is defiantly imbued in the
tweed.
Spirit of the Glen is very different in character, soft, yet
pungently subversive, rich and creamy with the most beautiful smoked barrel
notes played over a pear-tined eau de vie and pineapple grass melange. The
other HYLNDS aromas such as Bitter Rose,
Broken Spear and Isle Ryder share
a common weather of stony, lichen toned geography with touches of wild flora
and limpid pools, metalwork and sky.
Foxglove was a revelation. On paper I saw iris and peach and thought
perhaps David had reimagined Mitsouko
on the skin of Brontëan drama queen Cathy Earnshaw as she scours the moors for
her feral addictive Heathcliff. Foxglove
turned to be more ephemeral and captivating than I imagined. The perfume was
glittering flesh wrapped in the exquisitely mastered skin assembled most
carefully from musks, iris, immortelle and soft soft soft suede.
I realised early that David
Moltz has written a perfumed essay on the melancholy state of vigil. The
desolation of lonely attendance over a love lost to time. Foxglove is inspired by the story of Oisin, the Irish warrior poet,
his lover Niamh and the mystical land of Tir
Na Nog, the tempting Land Of Youth.
Foxglove is Niamh, watching devotedly
over the final resting place of her lyrical lover. David visited Oisin’s
resting place and found a solitary foxglove about twenty feet from the grave.
This lonely bloom, keeping watch, was the catalyst for David’s erudite
olfactory mind to wander and begin its fabulous detailed assemblage.
The carroty green chew in the
apex of Foxglove, mixed with a
delicious spray of citrus peel is beautifully deceptive, totally wrong-footing
the senses as the full power of the peach and orris combo radiates out with
terrific cold vintage force. David’s handling of this iconic peach note is both
reverential and brazen; echoes of bygone Guerlain flood the senses as the
lactonic fruit tones mingle with lemon and musks..but and it’s a big but, the
plush shimmer and ooze of Foxglove is
unique, aided in part by the use of Champaca and a stunning amber effect that
seems to throw a series of CGI lenses over the composition, lending depth,
sheen, gloss and luminescence depending on mood and time of day. A skeletal
slivered Mitsouko lies beneath a furred and dappled formula of magisterial
grace and power.
Foxglove
is a scent I will wear for as long as it is made. I feel unbearably sacred when
I wear it; it smells so defined and rare that I almost lose myself in its
oddity and significance. It is alchemy like the making of Foxglove and its subsequent osmosis with my skin that reminds me
why I do this, this writing thing, the words, the sampling, the endless
sniffing and foraging for fragrant juice. David and Kavi Moltz have created two
lines I adore, but HYLNDS has me hooked and Foxglove
is David’s best work yet, an epic of tremulous emotion on a quiet lonely
stage.
So, I finally end my harvest of
2014, for me a strong and intriguing year for perfumery. I already have some
great things lined up to review for this year that I look forward to sharing
with you all.
©TheSilverFox
31 January 2015
