When love is not madness, it is not love
Danish proverb
There are really
only a handful of Houses that I can honestly say I look forward to each of
their launches with anticipation and excitement, knowing instinctually I will
be fascinated, enamoured and intrigued. I count Mona di Orio, Arquiste, Vero
Profumo, Slumberhouse, Gabriella Chieffo Profumi, Masque Fragranze, Hermès,
HYLNDS, Papillion Perfumes, Laboratorio Olfattivo, MDCI Parfums among them.
There are others, but I am rarely deceived by work from the aforementioned; the
work is exemplary, emotive, built from superlative materials and composed by
men and women for whom olfaction is more than just notes, accords and formulae,
it is art with skin as canvas and our sense of smell as the discerning,
clamouring audience.
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| Foxy's Authors & Bookmarks... |
To the list above I
must add Imaginary Authors, founded by the lovely Josh Meyer, out of Portland
Oregon whose olfactive fictions and innovative bottled storytelling has been
delighting the Foxy paws off me since Josh’s unique library launched in 2012. I
have seven of his singular creations in my collection: the mulchy fog &
strawberries of Cape Heartache, the
asphalt & sunlit cigarette trails of The
Cobra and the Canary, Memoirs of a
Trespasser, all dense oaky vanilla and claustrophobic myrrh, the arid,
fig-laced sadness of Yesterday Haze,
the chilly Narnia wardrobe oddity of Air
of Despair, City on Fire, a thick swirling scent of cade and heat-burst
berries and Bull’s Blood, a
Hemmingway-esque tribute to doomed lurid love, torn roses and blood-soaked corridas.
I have samples of
the rest of the line and to be honest, bar one, L’Orchidée Terrible, I have loved them all, even the ones I may
have earlier struggled with like The Soft
Lawn and Mosaic, I now find I
like more and more. My senses have undergone quite a process of readjustment in
the last two years for one reason and another and I have reassessed a number of
lines I own. Small nuances and themes I missed or didn’t interpret the first
time round have surfaced or perhaps become more apparent. With various bouts of
illness and subsequent treatments and recovery I have noticed intriguing and
sometimes exasperating alterations to my olfactory receptors. It is something I
have to live with. It does make for vivid inhalation.
I notice that L’Orchidée Terrible has been dropped from
the Imaginary Authors shop page, so I am assuming Josh has dropped it from his
roster. I know he reformulated it, so that may have been an issue too, but it
was the only one in the line up I struggled with. I think the aldehydes and
whatever Josh was using to create his satin
note were just too raw, the blending made my head fizz.
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| Josh Meyer |
For those of you
unfamiliar with the Imaginary Authors concept, it is beautifully simple, Josh
creates wonderfully imagined precise fictions, memoirs and biographies complete
with synopses, author biogs and photos that he and Creative Director Ashod
Simonian cull from old year books, vintage ‘fitness’ magazines and other
esoteric sources. These artistic fictions are then edited alongside the juices
to carefully curate a collection of retro-styled distinctly emotive aromatic
bottled books. There are lovely influences at play in the literary
inspirations, writers like Willa Cather, Jack London, Salinger, Tennessee
Williams, Femimore Cooper, Carson McCullers, Henry James, Strindberg, Cocteau,
Hemmingway, little pieces here and there, places, moods, nods etc echo through
the library. It is never overstated or heavy-handed, it is not pastiche (well
maybe a little…). It is more suggestion, playful, subversive storytelling,
taken just that little further, but done with such brio and fun.
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| Foxy's Authors... |
A key component of
all great perfumery is storytelling. Everyone loves a story, something that
draws and binds them to a scent, making the juice more human and approachable.
After years of working in the industry I know all too well how tenuous a lot of
this stuff is, how fake and cynical. Prices continue to rise across all high
street, niche, indie and luxury couture scent and now more than ever,
storytelling has become a vital part of any perfume house’s weaponry. It is
just how it is rolled out that makes the difference. Consumers are much more savvy
now; social media allows myriad forms of access to instant info on new
launches, Houses, brands, noses and materials. Any story told that does not
hold water or reeks of cynicism will be torn down and mocked mercilessly. As
buyers and lovers of scent we are aware of course that we are part of an
inherently dramatic, moneyed, romanticised process and therefore will allow a
certain amount of chicanery and dramatic licence to pass by unhindered. If the
advertising/storytelling is wise, witty, original, genuinely sensual and
emotive, likewise we will listen, watch, inhale and perhaps be seduced. After
all, it is a boom business this scented thing, so the stories being told all
over the word in words, line and photographs must be doing their olfactive job
rather well. In Josh’s case, the storytelling is blatant and obsessively
creative, asking us to trust him as a writer of perfumes, to follow his scented
plots and lose ourselves in his imaginary worlds. It is a fabulous ask, and one
of evocative encounters and detailed dramas.
Each fragrance is an
adventure with protagonists, suggestive moods and a storyline proactively but
not overtly redolent of the notes and accords that Josh has utilised to create
the structure and ambience of his perfumes. It is without doubt a bold
undertaking and automatically sets a certain characterisation and mise-en-scène
to the proceedings, but Josh is exceedingly clever and able to work back and
forth between his imagined
suggestions and allowing his audience to use those ideas to create a perfect
balance of perceived and expected.
As I said, the
fragrances have a brief tight synopsis, an author and a concise list of notes.
The name of the book is the name of the perfume so when you wear it you are in
effect wearing the olfactive text, the plot and characters; you become part of
the story. One of the things I personally enjoy about Josh’s work is that I
find it quite difficult not to think about the details of the scent I’m
wearing, the characters, locales, dramatic milieu and happenings that he
describes for each publication. You can of course choose to ignore all of this
and just enjoy the scent, but I guarantee you’ll find it very hard to do so.
Josh and his team have gone to wonderful detailed lengths to create these
perfumes, why would you buy them if you weren’t intrigued by his storytelling?
It is at the very heart of what he does.
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| Yesterday Haze - Imaginary Authors |
2014’s Yesterday Haze was such a beautiful
entry into the series, a bone-dry fig scent with walnut bitters, cream tonka and
orchard dust, one of those Mayeresque abstracted accords that evokes so much.
They are dotted throughout his line. Bull’s blood, limestone, burnt matches,
mountain fog, warm sand, fresh tennis balls and clay court; wonderfully chosen
reveries to arouse and kick start the imagination. Yesterday Haze is by Leonora Blumberg, author of a previous Mayer
tome, Violet Disguise. Set in the
dust-swept Californian San Jaoquin Valley a farmer’s wife decides she can
longer live with deception and plans to tell her husband about her long time
affair with one of his employees, a crop-duster pilot.
“The memory of him is a rifle in my mouth,” Blumberg writes, “and the scent of fig its trigger.”
It is this powerful,
concise capture of suggested olfactive emotion that encapsulates Josh’s
approach to this work. The stories are always beautifully engaging; some more
than others, much like any reading material. But when you wear the scents and
begin to discern the materials unfolding in reactions to characters and
plotlines you realise how invested you are and actually emotional some of these
Imaginary Scents fragrances are. The dry expanse of fig, walnut and that weird
melancholy orchard dust accord in Yesterday
Haze reek of arid days, a woman lost in weary repetitive thoughts as she
stands in the scant shade of a seared plum orchard shielding her eyes to watch
the sky for the drone or trail of a distant plane.
It was a rare fig
scent that took me by surprise and I love its subdued, rather melancholy arc.
Fig scents are generally brighter and more summery in tone, mingled with
orange, neroli, cedar, leaf motifs and milkier notes to suggest the ripening
fruit. Yesterday Haze does none of
this, in fact is suggests to me a fading fig, left to decay perhaps on that
farmhouse table, alternatively catching light and shadow. All of this
strangeness, this attention to emotive oddness, aroma effects and how you feel
as the scents settles is due to the precise care and attention Josh entrusts to
his perfumes and also to how we might interact with them.
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| Highway Dreams... |
My other favourite
from the line is a very odd scent called The
Cobra and the Canary, inspired by a road trip of spiralling desolation by
James Spundt. Twenty three year old Neal Orris (Cassidy + Iris…) is led to a hidden 1964 Shelby Cobra Roadster by a
tip from a clairvoyant. The car was his dead father’s secret obsession and
concealed in a barn in Connecticut. Neal picks up his best friend Ike from a
dead end job and together they embark on a road trip littered with pseudonyms,
pretences, fresh-faced debutantes, run-down motels, azure pools and endless
smoking. It is book of road trip as avenue of life; choices, mistakes, love,
sex, ennui and death. What starts out as a game of two kids driving through
life, playing fast and loose with identities and truth becomes decadence and
darkness. I took a tracksuit top out of the wardrobe to wear the other day, I
hadn’t worn it for three weeks and it was still saturated in the weird ashen
tarmac spike of The Cobra and the Canary.
It is a very tenacious scent; it embeds and holds on for dear careening life. The
only way I can describe its fade is citric concrete dusted with remnants of
cold ashtray. Each time I wear the fragrance I think of Neal and Ike lost
somewhere on their trip of broken discoveries. The notes reinforce this notion
of dislocation and costly freedom.
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| Strawberries, fog, mulch and mould... |
The intensely
atmospheric foggy mulch of wild strawberries and damp mossy trees in Cape Heartache, a companion scent/book
by Philip Sava to his throaty, druidic oak-smoked vanilla Memoirs of a Trespasser. The lichen moist, Douglas fir redolence of
Cape Heartache are inspired by an imagined story of a 1880s homesteader and his
love for a woman who was a descendent of the local Nehelam Indian tribe. It
really is an astonishing scent; I never fail to be amazed by it; the collision
of sweet, oxidising alpine berries and a creeping sense of green weather. It
rolls off the skin and page like pale morning fog.
This ability to meld vivid
flashes of realism with fairytale abstraction is why I love Josh’s work so
much, there really is nothing else quite like out there. His cheeky conceit of
fictional guidance and artfully crafted textual suggestion imbues the whole
enterprise with enigma, beauty and balls to be honest.
The fragrances look amazing
too, I love a graphic concept. Josh’s friend Ashod Simonian is Creative Director
of Imaginary Authors and has been responsible for shaping the very distinctive
visual style of the brand. The two guys have worked hard to conceive a
framework house style that the library of fragrances will fit into. It is a
shifting mix of graphics motifs associated with the perfumes mixed with
authors’ biog pics and textual excerpts lifted from their work. The colour
palette is muted, 50s Americana in style, some Scandinavian and 60s British
Penguin design touches thrown into the mix.
The mingling of classic book cover design and ad agency insouciance is
wise and effective.
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| New Imaginary Authors packaging |
Ashod wraps a generic 50ml
bottle in elegant graphic designs; often-simple visual interpretations of key
elements of the synopsis, reduced to stylised symbols. They are bold, impactful
and have a visual language very much of their own. Up until quite recently,
Josh didn’t box his fragrances, now with the launch of Slow Explosions, we have Imaginary Authors packaging for the first
time across the line and it all looks beautiful, almost industrial, like
something manufactured for say use in workshops for storing pins and screws in.
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| An Air of Despair - Imaginary Authors |
Last year’s limited edition release An
Air of Despair had a beautiful label on a smaller 30ml bottle; pure white
gloss and gold with a raised golden crown above three gilded tears. Striking
and in keeping with the bright cold, cedar and saffron ghostliness of the juice
inside. It is an example to other more ostentatious brands that you can
facilitate intensity in your flacon and brand in elegant and simple ways by
using modish, eye-catching semiotics and neatly executed retro graphics. It is
a sharp way to interact with your target audience, using a relatively
customised standard bottle and keeping the price point down. It is this sense
of luxurious independence, always present in all aspects of Josh’s work that makes
being part of his world enjoyable.
I didn’t get around to
reviewing 2015’s Every Storm a Serenade
so I’m looking at it now alongside Josh’s delicious new publication Slow Explosions that in some ways revisits
and deepens that potent saffron riff he wrapped around bleached cedar and Narnia-cold
musks in An Air of Despair. They work
well as a diptych, one recounted in tones of blue and cloudy grey-bice, the
other told in told in exuberant golds, rust-rose and sunset.
These are two of the best things
Josh has done I think. I’ve taken my time wearing them over and over, reading
the nuances and sophistication of notes on my skin. I hesitate to say they are
more mature complex works because that implies his earlier oeuvre is somehow
slightly less finished or assembled.
However Every Storm and Slow Explosions do feel more rounded and
detailed, plush and gripping. I found myself quite addicted to both for
different reasons, the weird apple-reverb in Slow Explosions, mingled with leather and a hugely tannic saffron
note is seriously good scent. Whilst Josh’s take on a marine theme in Every Storm is typically idiosyncratic,
I found it beautifully bleak and mournful, his calone carefully calibrated to
whisper over spruce and eucalyptus, singing lullabies to whales. One plays with
external journeys to places and revelations, the other with the chilled winter
heart we carry inside, unable to burn when love eludes us.
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| Every Storm a Serenade - Imaginary Authors |
Every Storm a Serenade was launched in 2015 and is on paper a classic
marine scent; some calone, ambergris and one of Josh’s winsome abstractions,
Baltic Sea mist. The odiferous libretto is by Niels Bjerregaard, born in 1965
and from his judiciously chosen author’s biog pic, he is a man of intense
kindly gaze, but serious as if a little trapped by his writer’s gift.
‘I patter on the typewriter all day, but the letters on the page are
like raindrops on a window. I fear I may be losing my mind.’
From ‘Every Storm a Serenade’
by Niels Bjerregaard
The synopsis Josh suggests is
one of frozen longing, lust loss, frustration and spiralling writer’s angst set
against the moody, shifting land and seascapes of Denmark’s west coast in
winter. The main protagonist, Stina, a burgeoning writer, decides to go to her
mother’s summerhouse on the Danish coast off-season. Her two-day (and one
sensual night) trip overlap with a somewhat stereotypical but nonetheless sexy
and brawny fisherman called Ulu. The memories of this one night of sexual
passion with a man of the sea began to overwhelm and obsess Stina as her
concentration on her book falls apart. Her fevered state of longing is poured
into countless unsent letters that form the basis of Every Storm a Serenade, Stina imagining the very weather and
elements themselves singing and performing for her, swirling works of love,
crashing symphonies of desire.
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| Danish cabin designed by Lenschow & Pihlman(detail) |
Every Storm
opens cold, like morning fog on grey stone. The effluvial scent made me think
immediately of the similar low muggy textures of Cape Heartache. In that the fog lay over wild, bruised strawberries
and damp mossy trees. In Every Storm there
is a bruised chalkiness to the initial very striking and all too familiar blast
of Calone (methylbenzodioxepinone)
the aromachemical discovered by Pfizer in 1996 that triggered the ozone/marine
trend that swept through fragrance in the 1990s. It is also know as watermelon
ketone and when used deftly and married to perfect materials, this fresh cut
melon facet inhales in parallel with the more overtly perceived clean, saline-kissed
breeze that perfumers craved. I used to be very dismissive of marine scents mainly
because I overdosed on them in my teens but the fact of the matter remains that
two of them, L’Eau D’Issey and Acqua di Gio still smell beautiful and
timeless. It is Alberto Morillas’ 1996 Acqua
di Gio Pour Homme that swept through my olfactory memory when I first
smelled Every Storm… Aqua di Gio was
inspired by Armani’s memories of Pantellerie a secretive Italian island in the
Sicilian strait. Oddly it is the ravishing backdrop of A Bigger Splash, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, starring ralph
Fiennes and Tilda Swinton that I have just finished watching and loved to
pieces.
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| Eau d'Issey & Acqua di Gio |
The key to Acqua di Gio for me is the jasmine in
the top, a creamy blasted white floral note that Morillas loves and oily aromatic
rosemary a note to be used with caution or else it smells too acrid and overly
soapy. The soft, beachy laid-back groove of the Calone-soaked assembly still
smells amazing despite a few tweaks over the years. Guys just smell sexy in it;
the women’s version just overbalances the pineapple accord. It is still
beautiful but once I know that enzymic tropical note is there, I can’t get past
it. 2015 and 2016 has seen some rather special contemporary revivals of the
marine theme; Luca Maffei’s exquisite fine-grained Acquasala for Gabriella Profumi, David Maruitte’s atmospheric and
divisive 2013 Salina for Laboratorio
Olfattivo, full of pine needles and wet lavender and Cécile Zarokian’s Curacao Bay, one of the Fath’s
Essentials I discussed in a recent post that marries gorgeous marine notes with
blackcurrant, frangipani and a huge splash of tangerine. Oddly Alberto Morillas
made two of the worst offerings last year for Penhaligon’s London with the
tedious and virtually un-wearable Blasted Heath and Bloom duo that reeked of
cheap chlorine aromachemicals and downmarket car freshener aesthetics.
Josh has stripped away any
sense of sweetness and created a marine fragrance that lies down on the skin
like pale haunted rain, clinging to maudlin panes. I love the subtle rub of
eucalyptus that comes through very quickly adding a note of winter chest
infections, over the counter inhalants and nasal congestion. The minty,
terpenic leaf is a powerful winter associative and works perfectly with the
ghostly forest of spruce conjoured up by the body of the scent. The inclusion
of ambergris might lead some people to think that Every Storm will be oriental and aurous. Here however, it plays
much closer in symbolic spirit to a sense of the sea and the cetaceous origin
of ambergris as a bilatory excretion/ejection from the sperm whale. It then
starts an extraordinary journey of osmosis with seawater, salt, sunshine to
become the bizarre waxen, substance washed up on beaches or bobbing on oceans
that when purified and cleansed has such a beatific and transformative (needles
to say haute-luxe) effect of perfume as note, fixative and olfactive CGI.
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| Danish cabin designed by Lenschow & Pihlman |
There is a pale brackenish
miasma to the composition that never entirely leaves, the grey amber effect
floating across the surface of Every
Storm much like its waxy namesake journeying across the oceans, staining
the juice with a malleable yet undeniable presence. This fragrance has strange
moments linked I guess to Josh’s capture of water-haunted angst off the
storm-wracked winter coasts of Denmark. As a writer I think one is always tempted
to see all manifestations of weather and climate as sympathetic backdrop to
inner turmoil. It’s a writer’s trick as old as time itself, the externalising
of the writer’s spirit writ large and elementally across skies, land and
seascapes. Words, letters and symbols as rain, sleet, snow, wind and hail; the
page as weather-torn sky. Every Storm’s
protagonist Stina is elemental, her muse compromised and interrupted by
thoughts of that single passionate night with Ulu the fisherman, himself a
symbol for the unattainable standards she seeks in herself and own work or her
reason for neglecting it. Ultimately her unsent correspondence about her
fraught emotional state that will become a novel about the frustrations of
writing.
I like the latent chill and
suggested desolation in Every Storm. When I first sprayed it I got goosebumps;
it made me think of empty rain-soaked gardens, moss covered stones and eroded
ornaments slick with bright running water, trees and leaves weeping in damp
air. The very precise image Josh suggests of Stina bound to a winter cabin
room, harassed by a typewriter and blank or ruined pages as the rain falls
relentlessly outside is a potent and deeply atmospheric one. Storm outside,
storm inside. White paper, white sea. Tears, rain. Winter weather, writer’s
block.
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| Alarm call (image ©TSF) |
I was writing on Every Storm while preparing for major surgery
over in Glasgow on the west coast as the waiting times in Edinburgh were
lengthy. The Golden Jubilee is a strange, hospital, originally built as a private venture at the
cost of £180 million in 1994 on the site of the William Beardmore naval works
on the north bank of the River Clyde at Dalmuir. It was transferred into the
hands of the NHS in 2002 and has been incredibly successful in selective
disciplines, particularly orthopaedics. There is a luxury hotel attached to the
hospital used now for medical conferences that was originally used to house the
relatives of private patients using the facility. It was Arab money that paid
for the facility and the ultra private nature and exclusivity of the place is
still evident in the single wards, soundproofing and obsession with security.
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| Hospital room view (image ©TSF) |
The views over the Clyde were beautiful and the surrounding environs shockingly
quiet. The place was immaculate; every part of it has an eerie, overtly
clinical texture. Before my operation I wandered the achingly spotless
corridors and hardly saw a soul. I had to be retained overnight after the
procedure, issues with recovery and I was moved to a quiet, single room,
overlooking the still silent river and beech trees. The damp weather and
moisture-laden air coming through the window were a blessing after the fuggy
claustrophobia of crowded pre-op, cannulas and chatty recovery.
A fluke of corridor light
shining through the disposable sea-blue pleated curtains meant that my entire
private room seemed to be underwater. Drowsing on copious opiates and listening
to Max Richter’s eight-hour classical Sleep
album, I could discern heavy rain drumming off the glass and the insistent
ticking of the wall clock. I sprayed a generous amount of Every Storm on my skin and in the air around me and lay back in the
poignant embrace of Richter’s ambience. This melancholy perfume of Calone-suffused
desolation is a hermetic thing, but utterly compelling nonetheless. The top has
such a bold nostalgic dazzle, a wave-crash of marine distillate that fades to a
skin-close telling of rubbed, green gelid fade. The trees surrounding Stina’s
cabin stare down into the abyss of the sea. Every
Storm is a scent about a night alone, lost in one’s disjointed, primal
thoughts as weather and page seemingly conspire to thwart artistic flow. Of
course, it’s imagined fiction and
Stina triumphs through the surrendering of herself to the will of the storm. I
kept wandering in and out of drugged sleep, in my oceanic room, cellos and
murmured low vocals in my head, intercut with rain, catching soft pieces of
musky green and marine skin. Like night-swimming.
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| Slow Explosions - Imaginary Authors |
Slow Explosions, launched this summer is a very different
style of fragrance from the chilly, Baltic cling of Every Storm a Serenade, essentially a very beautiful slo-mo study
of saffron against a vividly rendered backdrop of apple-scented fireworks, a
perceived side-effect it seems of the CO2 saffron material Josh has used in the
formula. Whatever the objective, intended or otherwise, the slowness or more studied aspect of this
perfume allows us a closer elucidation of saffron on skin. This follows on from
Josh’s radiant and more furred
treatment in 2015’s limited edition An
Air of Despair, where the saffron was sublimated with bone white cedar and
musks.
I think too the slowing down
of experience in life is referenced here too. Ensuring moments are not missed,
people, experiences and conversations are absorbed. You might perhaps rest more
often, detour and alter your days, find yourself in places that unsettle and
thrill simultaneously. As with all Imaginary Authors scents, Slow Explosions has its story, starting
in 1980, written by Gwen K. Vroomen, described as a self-proclaimed ‘journey out of darkness’, begins with
Gwen trapped in a boring job going to her local corner bar and at the urging of
the barman hurling a dart at a map of the world pinned to the wall. The dart
hits Goa, somewhere she has never heard of on the other side of the world.
Three months later, Gwen is celebrating Vishu, Hindu New Year in Kerala as the
sky fills with fireworks, her life irrevocably changed forever by that throw of
the dart and her decision to follow it. The dusty moped rides, river floats, night
markets, tea plantations; Gwen has been ‘…resuscitated
by colour, redeemed by the unknown.’
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| Saffron... the golden spice.. |
Saffron is a much beloved
Foxy fragrance note in scent, be it moulded and metallic to resemble gold in 888 by Antoine Lie for Comme des Garçons
or buttered and basmati-echoed like the scrumptious and neglected Safran Troublant by Olivia Giacobetti
for L’Artisan Parfumeur. It was a beautiful surprise in Jean-Claude Ellena’s
recent Eau de Néroli Dorée for Hermès,
adding the gilded dorée to the
neroli; suffusing his vibrant, Provençal orange and bigarade with the most
delicious shimmering weather of pollen-soft spice. It is the golden spice of
biryanis, staining the rice and mixing with rosewater and the nuttiness of the
rice. I have always been fascinated by its strangeness, its origins, the painstaking
hand-harvesting of the individual crocus stamens. This delicate crackling jewel
that imparts such immense beauty to food and scent is one of the world’s most
expensive spices and rightly so. I search for it in scent; when it works it can
be dazzling, such a curious aroma, the biting metallic sweetness, tempered as
it is here in Slow Explosions by a
rather compulsive sulphuric apple-toned halo that lingers like gun smoke after
a crime.
Slow Explosions takes place in Kerala at Vishu, the traditional
Keralan New Year that takes place in the second week of April and marked by
lights and fireworks. The Vishu feast or Sadya
is built around a combination of sour, salty, sweet and bitter items. A key
element to Vishu is the Vishukkani or
‘The first thing seen on the day of Vishu
after waking up’. Essentially it is a display of auspicious objects such as
coins, konna blooms, areca nuts, holy
texts etc lit by the warm ambient glow of nilavilakku
or oil lamps. Everything illuminated by quiet votive lamps or the dazzle of
firecrackers and skyrockets. As someone who has cooked a lot over the years,
roasting and grinding my own spices, creating my own masala blends, Kerala
means spice trade to me and has indeed been trading since 3000BCE in black
pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, coconut and coir.
India has long had a literary
traditional of transfiguring characters through landscape. Women like Adele
Quested in the Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Daphne Manners in Paul Scott’s masterly Raj
Quartet. Right through to the endless stream of gap year students and
do-gooders that clutter the Goan beaches. Gwen in many ways is just another part
of this fraught, dazzled lineage, searching for a sense of self amid a cacophony
of night markets, poverty, freedom, culture shock and never-ending western
naiveté. The fragrance itself is a mix of romance and harsh realism, slum air
and blooming exoticism.
The rose absolute is as
bitter as death when it first appears, scowling and caped like an avenging
angel amid the weird smoked apple fumes. The leather note that comes on pretty
strong at the beginning is internal, that unfinished pelty drag under finger
inside something, not the smooth, smiling, butter-soft exterior. There is
something a little bloody in the mix, an echo of Josh’s Bull’s Blood, not quite the full crimson splash but still enough of
a hint of spicy sanguineous assimilation. I LOVED An Air of Despair last year and even bought a back up bottle,
knowing it was a limited edition. The saffron in that was potent enough, but
chilled, cold and dressy, worn like an icy crown as you wandered a snowy
landscape. I get the pacing of saffron in Slow
Explosions, a more measured and detailed resolution of the atmospheric spice
as a note of fiction; it smells beautiful, wide and openly ochre, lit through
with night sparks and cordite. But it’s the lush, reaching combo of sooty rose
and urgent leather that actually demand your attention. A generous lick of
genuinely recognisable benzoin lacquers up the main theme, reinforcing the
animalic drift of the leather tone.
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| Smoke wreathed apple.... |
I go through phases of
obsessively drinking Hazer Baba, an instant granulated version of Turkish elma çay or apple tea I buy from a
particular Arab grocers on the student side of town. I’m fascinated by its
granulation/just add water thing, but Hazer Baba also has an amazingly pungent
aroma when you open the box, a mix of sweet and dried sulphured apple rings,
honeyed sugar and a peculiar burnt aroma I sense in Slow Explosions as the apple note expands off the skin. It’s hard
to avoid comparisons with Bertrand Duchaufour’s Traversée du Bosphore in the later stages of Josh’s fragrance. The
rose and leather dance a similar slow waltz; petals become skin and skin falls like
autumn soft blooms. Bertrand used a pretty acerbic lather note in Traversée du Bosphore to suggest the
tannic, urinous whiff of Istanbul’s many historical tanneries. It is quite a
fleshy, scraped note that rolls around my olfactive consciousness as I inhale
the shattered explosion of singed apple and supple, market leather that Josh
has woven through Gwen’s lovely drama of Slow
Explosions.
Like many of the Imaginary
Authors offerings, Slow Explosions,
is both an imagined and aromatic journey, protagonists setting off on voyages, road
trips, pilgrimages and familial explorations. An Air of Despair, The Cobra and the Canary, Bulls Blood and Falling into the Sea all examine life on
the edge, moving through transformative experience. Gwen K. Vroomen’s
onomatopoeic movement from random dart choice map coordinate to celebratory
rose-tinted fireworks in Kerala three months later is some sense of movement.
‘I was lost, aimless and depressed. Now I am only two of these things.’ From
‘Slow Explosions’ by Gwen K.
Vroomen
I wonder which two? I would
like to think Gwen under the shrieking crack and coloured pop of the Keralan
lightshow is perhaps still lost and a little aimless, guided to Kerala by dart
and whim, but her depression massaged, lifted and illuminated by rose, saffron
and exploding colour, resuscitating her joie de vivre and setting fire to
something inside her old mundane life. There are so many clichés associated
with young milk-faced Americans finding
themselves in faraway places, seeking personal epiphanies in places that
more often than not profoundly alter them in ways they could never even began
to imagine. Gwen’s journey ‘out of darkness’ ends in symbolic flowers of fiery
light. For others, trial by country, poverty, illness, kindness, light,
darkness, debt, corruption, theft, bravery and brutal self-awareness is a
longer more damaging journey with a multitude of hidden scars.
 |
| Apora night market |
Slow Explosions is a fiction of risk, Gwen taking a huge leap of
faith into an uncertain Keralan future to find herself lit by Vishu glow and
fireworks 1000s of miles from home, face radiant with collective experience. As
per usual with Josh, there is one of his abstracted notes listed alongside the
others, this time it is Apora Night
Market, in reference to the regular Goan Saturday market/shindigs that take
place in the evenings from 6pm onwards to tale full advantage of the cool night
air. Selling everything from apples, leather goods and street food to beauty
products, t-shirts and ornaments; there are also stages for musicians to
perform, the whole atmosphere being one of vibrant colour, creativity and
commerce. You have to imagine in your own head the aroma of this place and how
that might translate into an accord for scent. For me it’s simply an imagined
odour of ambient drifting spice, tea, smoke, leather and the cooling night
sweat of visitors. I love the rose and leather dance that rises and falls
throughout the mix, wrapped in that pungent apple and saffron, rolling, smoke
over cured fruit over carmine bloom. There is a particular weightlessness to Slow Explosions, a country of abandoned
formality, reflective perhaps of Gwen’s desire to shed an old life under the
crackle of and joyous pop of New Year Fireworks.
Once again with Josh’s work,
it the elegant simplicity of his suggested narrative, his aromatic nudges along
the way, the odyssey of Gwen from dart to fireworks; these things make wearing Slow Explosions such an addictive
pleasure. If you read reviews which I rarely do to be honest, you will notice
how comprehensively divisive the reactions to the Imaginary Authors library is.
A lot of it is snobbery. There are some incredibly supportive and passionate wearers
of Josh’s work out there and really, only the haters and blowhards write the
pointless vitriol anyway. I don’t care and I’m sure that Josh doesn’t really
either to be honest. His olfactive fictions and innovative artistic perfumes
have a devoted following by people who read, wear and understand his work for
what it is, consummate scented storytelling for adventurous, intrigued and
romantic souls.
The not judging books by
their covers is an old adage but a pertinent one in terms of the artistry of
Imaginary Authors perfumery stock. Josh beckons us to judge, choose, wonder and
wear on carefully selected words, notes, atmospheric concise synopses and of
course Ashod Simonian’s compellingly designed graphic art. The collection is
now beautifully boxed. It seems odd, but normally the 50ml sprays arrive as
they are with their matching bookmark and some samples. I love the Slow Explosions design, a simple mix of
three key elements: stylised firework roundels, three (Keralan) peaks and a
hand reaching in wonder for both. All this on a creamy saffron ground and a
block of dark red to suggest that beautiful rose absolute. The line is now being expanded to include stylish 14ml travel atomisers, designed in the same chic, graphic way as the rest of the collection.
Every Storm a Serenade and Slow
Explosions are both beautiful and ambitious additions to the Imaginary
Authors canon. While they feel more complex in terms of style and emotional
content to some of the earlier formulae they still manage to continue that
playful sense of olfactive prose and carefully planned authorship that Josh has
made a serious feature of his work since day one. He has never gotten lazy with
his concept over the years either, the details, humour, precision, references
and odiferous editorship remain remarkably inventive and sharp.
We wear the fragrances and
walk in the light and drama of his personages, seeing the world albeit briefly
through their eyes, their days, nights and odours. This suspension of belief is
not too much to ask for when the materials and aromas are this delicious and
the charms of our guide this seductive.
©TheSilverFox 05/11/16
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