The eerie celadon-toned
wash of Room 237 in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining is the creeping inspiration
for one of the most unsettling perfumes I have discovered for a while. I’m
enthralled and a little appalled by this claustrophobic essay in abandoned floral
silence. Room 237 by Bruno Fazzolari is
uncomfortable scent making, a prickling journey of disintegrating soapy
compulsion that is hard to shake.
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| Foxy bottle of Room 237 by Bruno Fazzolari |
I have been wearing
this lurid aroma for a while and find myself in love with the toxicity, its
suggestion of nocturnal soapiness on the edge of mould, mingled with absence,
mildew, wall, tile and fleeting hints of phantom ablutions. It is like nothing
else in my collection.
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| Room 237 by Bruno Fazzolari (shower curtain impression I) |
Bruno is a San
Francisco based artist who earned his MFA at San Francisco Art Institute in
1996 after graduating with a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in
1991. He has exhibited in groups as a solo artist in LA, New York and across
California. He has synaesthesia, the much discussed condition which allows
those that suffer if I have to use
such a term, to taste colour, see music and taste sounds. The senses to a
certain degree are cross-wired, but this description barely does the condition justice,
it is far more complex and abstract than that. Many people see it is a gift, a
secret talent, a special viewfinder on the world. I think for Bruno, odours
splinter into tonal impressions that move and shift with rather distinctive
emotional effect. These colour mood boards that form inside his mind and
sometimes on paper act as a point of departure for olfactory exploration.
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| Bruno's sensory colour breakdown of rose otto (source - Bruno Fazzolari blog) |
There are many
different manifestations of synaesthesia and experts continue to redefine the
mechanisms and protocols of individual experiences. Some people feel skin
sensations on hearing certain sounds, others see colours instead, letters have
colours, sounds and words have tastes. A particularly rare manifestation is
genuinely empathetic; synesthetes witnessing for example a touch to a person’s
cheek will feel that same gesture on their own face. It is a deeply intriguing
and emotive subject and makes for very interesting discussion when applied to the
creative arts, be they visual, musical, olfactive or even gustatory.
Bruno’s own
experiences with synaesthesia are concerned with his visualisations of
perfumery materials and how their tonalities
develop as they drydown or shift on skin and blotters. I can relate to this in
my own way. Throughout my years of writing, I am always searching for new,
innovative and interesting ways to discuss and intrigue with olfactive prose. I
am overtly preoccupied with colour and use chromatic definitions and
comparisons a lot in my fragrance writing. In Bruno’s own words on his
website’s blog he has an intriguing explanation of synaesthesia:
‘Consider how yellow is a quality of the
experience of lemons. It's very natural to know that an experience
of lemons includes yellow — but not exclusively, since your actual
experience of a lemon is multi-sensory. When you experience a lemon,
you don't isolate a single aspect. The tactile quality of the
skin, the scent, the colour, the sharp, sour taste, all of these are mixed
together. The yellow is not wiping out the rest of your experience with
its yellow-ness. And so you know the lemon to be yellow in a very ordinary way.
In your actual experience, there is one, undivided, ever shifting, smelling-vibrating-seeing-touching-thinking-tasting
experience that is the experience of a lemon—and that experience includes
yellow-ness.
I'm not sure that describes the experience of
synaesthesia very well, but maybe it demystifies it a little. For me, scent
"has color" in the same way. Complex scents like rose oil or jasmine
absolute, have several colors and those colors change and shift.
Bruno Fazzolari
A recent 2012
documentary by Rodney Ascher called Room
237 gave a multi-voice showcase to
various theories regarding the symbolism supposedly buried within the ornate
controlled structures of Kubrick’s masterpiece. Everything from carpet
patterns, larder tins and Danny’s sweater to the Minotaur & labyrinth
theory and Native American Indian genocide are discussed with earnest and
rather disturbing sincerity. Interestingly Stephen King has refused to watch
it; but then Kubrick’s The Shining is
a very different beast from King’s modulated tight, building prose hysteria.
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| Stanley Kubrick's annotated copy of 'The Shining' |
It
is a film and experience that really does divide. I adore horror films, it
might surprise many of you to know that, but it’s my favourite genre of movies.
I like them schlocky too, but nothing beats the visceral thrill of beautifully
crafted psychological horror. Fear soothes me, the unsettling reminds me I am
alive. I like to be disturbed, provoked and challenged. Safety in art forms is
dull. Yes, I can admire the majesty of true beauty, but there has to be a
catch, a flaw, just something off. This introduces a singularity.
 |
| Danny. Patterns. Overlook. Carpet. Sweater. |
The prowling, Steadicam
menace of The Shining is an
experience that roams the senses long after the film descends into door
smashing theatrics. The film is full of moments that resonate with glowing
hazard, thunder and shine. The twin
girls, the snowy maze, blood tsunami, the Overlook bar scene and of course
Jack’s slippery, macabre rendezvous in the sickly clinic-hued haze of Room 237.
In the book a certain Lorraine Massey books into Room 237, an older woman whose
has a penchant for younger men and bellboys. When one of these young men leaves
her she overdoses and dies in the room. Her presence and lingering hunger is
saturated into Kubrick’s vision with Jack’s creepy encounter with an initially
beautiful nude woman who rises from the bathroom and kisses him only to age
rapidly into a pale, grasping crone, reaching for desperate desire.
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| Room 237 scene - The Shining (1980) |
It is one of the
most unpleasant scenes in the whole film, all the more so for the way it is lit
and filmed in queasy shades of enclosed viridian and washed out jadeite. The
sense of close up skin, hair, nightmare intimacy and forced engagement is
vividly realised. I first saw The Shining
when I was about thirteen and this scene just horrified me. Obviously it was wholly
unsuitable at the time, but I watched it anyway, gleefully freaked out. When I
first noticed reviews of a scent called Room
237 popping on blog sites I knew I had to have some.
Up until the launch
of Room 237, Bruno’s work had
fundamentally been linked to and inspired by his artwork. Lampblack for example, a bizarre collision of bright bitter
grapefruit, orange and nagamotha was created to accompany an exhibition of ink
paintings at the Gallery Paule Anglim in 2001.
The name refers to the black painters’ pigment made from burnt lamp
soot; it smells so disconcerting on skim, like cold morning sun trying to
penetrate a dirt stained window. It has a sensation on skin of making you
feeling observed, as if someone were looking over your shoulder. A shadow
following you and not your own. Lampblack
works, (and it shouldn’t really) because Bruno has ventured far enough into a
swinging bulb-lit hinterland as to allow the shadows and light to coalesce and
writhe. I’m not sure how I feel about the acerbic top notes, but the atramental
body and sooty bleed are addictive and impressively focused.
Monserrat takes its name from the colour monserrat orange, a gorgeous
peachy, faded tone that reminds me of Renaissance frescoes which is fitting as
the fantasy note Bruno has played with is setting plaster. You can smell this
odd chilled damp wall effect amid the musks, jasmine, grapefruit and powdery
carrot seed. As it settles it gives off an odd buzz of Berocca effervescent
vitamin tablets. Orange and I do not play well; I turn the note oddly dark and
strip out the brightness. When I returned to this an hour or so later the
chalkiness made me smile which is interesting. I’m not sure why, but I rather
liked the fading flat Fanta effect.
Jimmy is a strange tight floral scent inspired by James Schuyler, the
American Pulitzer award-winning poet whose work is intimately conversational
and yet somehow imbues the everyday with heroic beauty and pathos. I’m a poetry
nut and love the poems of American writers like Ashbery, Plath, O’Hara, Sexton,
Bishop and `Berryman. Jimmy has the
softest lipstick accord over a mossy base, peculiar in light of its
inspiration, but the floral notes have a gentle poetry as they float over a
skein of powdery heliotrope and Bruno’s abstract daylight note. It’s not for me, but the violet note is sheer and
rather sad.
A friend smelled Five and said ‘wet dog..’ which is pretty bang on. Factor in wet dog on a beach and a mineralised sandy air
facet and it’s how the scent unfolds. It was premiered at an exhibition of
bright colourful artworks lit by buzzing fluorescent lights so Bruno has in way
lit the scent with ozonic touches and the pretty vibrant zing of neroli and
bergamot. It smells damp and ragged as it evaporates, the notes don’t quite
hold together for me, but that initial kite-flying exuberance is bright enough.
Olivier Messaien is
considered one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers. He is
also one of the oblique and potentially frustrating too. He eschewed many
standard descriptions of his work, believing only in music with or without
colour. Like Bruno, Messaien was a synesthete, in his particular case, seeing
colours when he heard certain notes. His life’s work of notes, chords,
harmonies, progressions and structures are transfused with this extraordinary
vision of the world. It’s an acquired taste. Bruno’s Au Delà is his homage to Messaien, a bold, rambunctious
chypré-licked floral with shards of neroli and coriander played over an overtly
raw-edged marriage of sticky jasmine, orange flower absolute and a cold amber
derivative which seems to emphasise the jarring haze of the white flowers. I
struggle a little with jasmine this jammy sometimes, so as much as I rather
liked the overall sense of beauty within the glare and disconnections of notes,
Au Delà is not something I would wear.
The final fade is the part I like most, a shudder of bruised violet then
nothing.
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| Room 237 |
Room 237 is Bruno’s masterpiece though, a perverse enclosed universe of
soapy paranoia and urgent proximity. The opening reek of aldehydes feels like
alien arterial spray reeking out of the bottle, shot through with lemon from
one those tactile squeezy facsimile lemon things and cut with sharp metallic
tarragon. It all slows down dramatically as a queasy astonishing costus effect
nudges its way against your body, under your nose as if an unwashed scalp was
trying to make contact from the other side.
The perfume comes
boxed as an art piece in a brown card carton, accompanied by an art card
linking it to its artistic inspiration. In this case Bruno has created a
miniature business card impression of The Shining’s lurid green bathtub and
shower curtain in a screen-print type effect. Bruno Fazzolari boxes are stamped
with the perfumer’s personal take on the Japanese hanko or stamped seal. In Japan, hankos are very official and must be registered with the
government. According to Bruno’s lovely blog he was looking to create a unique
way to personalise his boxes. His elegant abstract three-unit symbol is an
adaptation of an old alchemical symbol for gold. The finished pictogram
resembles stylised trees, flowers and lollipops. Bruno had the original stamp
carved in stone in Japan and sent to him in California. The resulting stamp is
perfect, a lovely hybrid of Bruno’s wants and echoes of other more esoteric
sources.
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| Bruno Fazzolari box, typeface & hanko |
Room 237 is intimately odd, I find myself preoccupied with the soapiness.
The listed fleabane is essentially a daisy note and combined with bay and other
offbeat floral aberrations setting a scene of potent connubial ablution. A mix
of shave cream, hair spray, bay rum and Lux soap ghosted over an insistent
tactile vinyl odour, a dread mildewed cling of old shower curtain. It smells
hyper real then intensely imagined like a trick designed to disorientate you.
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| Room 237 (shower curtain impression II) |
The oppoponax is
weird stuff here; it’s a resin I find hard to handle sometimes, translating as
a sweetish, greasy smoke or a vaguely faecal haze of dread. Oscillating between
noble and cadaverous depending on the levels used; in Room 237, it is pungent and cloying, deliberately so I think to
provide textural relief from the roaming phantom soapiness. As the shudder and
shrill rendering of the opening notes fade down, the true disquieting nature of
the grimy soapy florals begin to bloom like damp stains on forgotten walls and
ceilings.
All the while it is well
nigh on impossible to stop inhaling the scent despite visions of damp cling and
unwashed bathroom tiles. Bruno’s mature handling of his frankly macabre and
contradictory palette works with fucked up precision and timing. The smell of
pissy spattered flowers, abandoned fittings, lost skin, ghostly scalp,
forgotten frailties, powders, plastics, mildew, residues, soap lather and phantom
bouquets. All of this has been assembled into a haunted scent of foreboding sway
and surprisingly tenacity.
It has been some
time since I was quite so jolted by a perfume, but Room 237 has a fabulous, insidious inspiration and impresses as a necro-floral
nocturne of some considerable power. It is difficult, confrontational,
perturbing, compelling, dirty, haunting needful, salacious and deviant. But I
will be wearing and loving every mournful, mould-possessed drop of it. We all
need to live a little in Room 237, fear and uncertainty are good for the jaded
soul.
For more information on Bruno Fazzolari, please click on the link below:
©TheSilverFox
24 September 2015
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