‘I am no beauty, no mirror
is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death
grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself.’
From The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora
Carrington
I was alerted to the intricate singularities of John Beibel’s work by reading a review of his January Scent Project trio, Smolderose,Eiderantler and Selperniku by Lucy Raubertas, a trusted olfactive wordsmith that I take due care and attention to read. Her blog indieperfumes.com is an astutely written collection of personal thoughts on American and European indie perfumes and what she refers to as micro niche, perfumes rooted and blooming in certain places that have tantalisingly small distribution.
If I roll the names Eiderantler, Smolderose, Selperniku and Vaporocindro around in my mind, they
become conjured wandering creatures, clothed in muted raiment of earth, stone,
forest, wild flower, smoke and morbid petal. They walk scented eternally in
colours of decay, rust, pistils, leaf, stone, seashore and woodland bower. Like
apostles erring in a wilderness of blasted paint, androgyny and eerie beauty,
each of John Biebel’s beautifully named perfumes captivated me the moment his
molecules hit my air.
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| Foxy's JSP Trio... |
John is an
established painter working out of Waltham Mills, a former cotton and textiles
factory outside Boston built on the Charles River at 144-190 Moody Street. The
historic building is now home to about seventy artists working across a dynamic
range of multi-media artistic disciplines. He is a graduate of Cooper Union,
one of the United States’ oldest and most highly respected colleges, located in
the East Village side of Manhattan where he studied painting and photography.
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| John Biebel |
He speaks a certain
style of patterned chromatic notation, his collective travelling, musical,
sensual, linguistic and searching experiences are laid down in vivid and
arresting works. Portraits, landscapes but mostly an evolving series of urban
images, etiolated buildings and blinded windows, wires and trees piercing
collapsed skies. The cityscapes have a strange upward rush to them, a reach and
blur I find oddly moving.
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| John Biebel Shore - oil on canvas 24x 24 2005 Private Collection |
The work tastes surreal in its linework and movement,
the glaze of oddity, something just happening off canvas. As someone obsessed
with colour and how others use it I was intrigued particularly by the diverse
vocabulary of green on display in John’s work from mantis, pea, sage and
verdigris to absinthe, celadon, jade, moss and chartreuse. This flare for
chroma runs through his perfumery as a mix of olfactory discipline and scenting
outside the lines.
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| John Biebel Green Landscape - oil of canvas 20 x 22 2006 Private Collection |
Like so many of us
with artistic dispositions, John has wandered and jobbed around including an
intriguing stint in Haggerston, London teaching English as a second language. He
is a one-Biebel band under the guise of Ichigatsu and a founding member of
Subforum, a design and research collective based in Cambridge MA interested in the
improvement of our environment, ecosystem, and experience through design.
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| John Biebel Imaginary Portrait, Boy With Crown oil on canvas 2016, Private Collection |
He does have a day
job, working for Pearson North American, an organisation that aims to promote
and empower human progress through learning, which if you stop for a moment and
think about it is different and more impactful than education. John is a UX or
User Experience Designer with Pearson, one of those slightly nebulous job
titles that seems on paper the epitome of modern HR office-speak, but in actual
fact the role is a important people-related function, focussed on humans with
all their foibles, weaknesses and arrogance, creating experiences for them
within organisations to enhance their working lives and of course ally this
with producing results for companies large and small.
I like these
olfactive artists who come to perfumery through other pathways, their skillsets
flavoured by ink, cloth, concrete, wood, paint, ceramics, herbalism and
photography. They bring stained and crafted experience with them and apply
their gathered abilities to perfumery, often from scratch as a kind of
challenge to themselves. The results of course vary but as I have said before,
the flaws are often outweighed by the sheer flair and imagination on display.
The Why Can’t I? approach,
uninhibited by automatic years of rigid laboratory training. I don’t want to
imply that that one methodology is better than the other; it’s just that the
results are different and the people practising them are best suited to one
technique or another. Comfort zones are just that. Comfortable.
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| January Scent Project box for Foxy's 30mls. |
As John is a
talented painter, Antonio Gardoni of Bogue Profumo is a designer and architect,
Bruno Fazzolari is a fascinating synesthetic painter, Hans Hendley is
passionate about analogue photography and music, artistic directors like Carlos
Huber at Arquiste are obsessed with architectural history, Leo Crabtree of
Beaufort as well being the drummer with The Prodigy has an abiding passion for British
maritime history, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz paints alongside perfume creation in
Boulder Colorado, Dr Ellen Covey of Olympic Orchids Perfume is a prize-winning
orchid breeder and also one of the world’s leading experts in bat echo location
techniques and the enigmatic Andrea Maack has always channelled her Icelandic art
into beautiful olfactory work.
John has been a
writer on Fragrantica since 2011; his writings have a strong emphasis on the
mechanics and chemistry of perfumes. He has written regularly on perfume
materials, perfumers such as Carlos Benaim, Olivia Giacobetti, Bertrand
Duchaufour, Jacques Cavallier, Sonia Constant and penned his way through an
intriguingly diverse range of niche perfume lines, houses, noses and artistic
directors.
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| John Biebel Bulgarian Rose Attar, Chelsea Physic Garden oil on canvas 16 x 20 2006 Private Collection |
A close friendship
at Fragrantica with fellow writer Ida Meister has taught John much about the
synaptic and psychological impact of odour and how finely tuned aromatics can
alter our perceptions of personal environment. Ida’s writing is like cello
music, rich and harmonious, echoing with crafted meaning and the gentle slow-pulled
bow of olfactive instinct. Her years of writing have given her a huge
repertoire to draw on and when she reviews her mind peruses this library of experience
to create rich reflections that range in tone from gothic and operatic to
literary and homely.
The gathered range
of his meticulous curiosity has over the years helped fuel his expert and
individual movement into perfumery. You get a sense in his reviews and
editorial of someone for whom curiosity grows incrementally into something more
emotional and tactile. It is no longer enough just to merely write about the
odours that intrigue; a desire to create blooms takes over and leads to the
January Scent Project, the name John has applied to his strange pilgrim
perfumes…
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| Foxy's January Scent Project Trio... (Image © TSF) |
The first thing to
bloom from the fertile garden of John’s mind was the Smolderose perfume oil, launched in 2015. The transition to actual
bottled, packaged and promoted work is far from easy as many independents are
well aware, but for some loners and autodidacts, they much prefer the control
over all parts of their process and the security of knowing their imagination
will not be diluted.
‘Now in the hands of those not officially
trained in chemistry, we bring different backgrounds to this combination of
art, craft and science. Some of the results can be less than fascinating, but
others have expanded our perceptions into new realms. If anything, we've
learned that the mixing of essences is a level playing field, available to any
of us, and particularly open to the development via collaboration. So many
people have contributed to the beginning of January Scent Project through
conversation, contemplation and sharing. It's a wonder to bring something alive
from the collective good will of individuals bound by the power of scent. At
the same time, the learning curve is steep, and rightfully so. People creating
artisan scents should be making the best quality products possible.’
This statement by
John, taken from his January Scent Project website is very important in terms
of how he approaches his work but also how he would like his work to be
received by others. It should also really be a manifesto for artisanal and
independent perfumers everywhere: …the
mixing of essences is a level playing field, available to any of us… a
quiet yet seismic statement that pitches at the deep-rooted foundations of
elitist perfumery. A lot of classically trained perfumers would argue that
home-schooled or self-taught creators are not real perfumers or merely
dabblers. I would argue that often some of these perfumers are by their
self-taught introspective nature often obsessively focussed on themes and
creating distinctive work that mirrors their own experiences. Yes, obviously
tasking them to scale up and work briefs for large houses would be tricky but
why would they and what would be gained in trying to challenge and fracture
what makes them so interesting in the first place?
John’s work feels so
invested with surreal life, I’m not entirely sure I want an explanation, but I
am constantly drawn back into his odours over and over, so search I must. His
artistry is apparent in the juxtaposition of materials and effects. His
creations wander brilliantly through a landscape of perfume made barren by
repetition, ubiquity and barely concealed plagiarism. The air reeks of tired
oud, generic locker room haze and sickly gourmandise. His quartet is veils,
masks, hoods and cloaks on frames of whittled white bone, leaf, metal, fire and
fissure. They speak histories of beach pyres, night deaths, hybrid fauna and
mournful stags with antlers of glowing green ivy lit by fireflies. Rivers of
moonmilk flow upwards towards flickering mountains. Flowers bloom like
fireworks, petals snatched by sudden winds. Spoor fills in with moss, seeds and
moist mulch.
I actually can’t
remember now what I was expecting John’s work to smell like. Different sure.
Painterly? Maybe. But it wasn’t this dramatic visual response I had, skin
prickling and my mind careening into my returned obsession with surrealist
painter Leonora Carrington and her œuvre of dream shards and biographical
disintegration. Sometimes upon inhaling I am crowded with assassinations and
languor, other time it takes me longer to fall as I navigate John’s fascinating
connective alchemy. I know this is important perfumery because I feel something,
murmurs of familiarity, eye-catches of memory.
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| Smolderose (Image © TSF) |
To have one
beautiful composition like Smolderose
is one thing, but four? I was sick with odourlove after my initial exposure to the
trio and later on when Vaporocindro
dropped. I wore them on skin, on sheets, in my hair, on clothes. Wearing them
at night, something I do a lot with fragrances I am writing on was darkly
erotic, lying amid John’s painted scentscapes, eyes shut against light and
monsters as his weather rolled over me. I began to examine how they made me
feel in the darkness of my shuttered room.
Once I had made the
link between these complex and original perfumes and the work of Leonora
Carrington I found it virtually impossible to disentangle my impressions from
my often-morbid preoccupations with her art. She is without a doubt one of the
most compelling and misunderstood artists of the twentieth century, not I think
a concept that would really have troubled her. As a woman, her exquisitely
detailed and powerfully realised Surrealism was maligned by peers and on a
personal level the fabric of her intensely private life was ripped apart on
more than one occasion by events that loomed monumental in trauma. Surrealism
was strictly speaking a masculine art movement, intrigued; nay besotted with
the mysteries and shadowed caverns of femininity. Woman were muse, not the
wielder of brush or camera. The female surrealists such as Méret Oppenheim,
Leonor Fini, Bridget Bate Tichenor, Valentine Hugo, Dorothea Tanning and Dora
Maar were not treated well by male contemporaries or critics of the time, their
work often dismissed as overly emotional, whimsical and derivative or somehow
less then the big boy names like May Ray, De Chirico, Dali, Ernst and Tanguy.
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| Leonora Carrington And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur 1953, oil on canvas |
My mother first
showed me a Leonora Carrington painting when I was a sullen teen. It was in one
of the auction catalogues she used to receive in the post. As someone who was home
schooled a lot as we travelled abroad, I was used to her showing me eclectic things
she felt I should see or read. It was so long ago I can’t remember the name of
the painting, but I remember the almost electrical shock of seeing a canvas
inhabited by such strange, hooded beings, creatures searching amid ornate fruit
and carriages. Arcana and mystery shroud Carrington’s work in troubling
calmness. The games and ceremonies played out in repetitive chambers, caves and
valleys have a hypnotic magnitude to them as you wander her dense output. The
art you see as a child haunts your mind forever.
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| Leonora Carrington, date unknown. © 2016 Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York |
Leonora Carrington
was a wild troublesome child, expelled from two schools and defiantly creative.
She was only reluctantly allowed to study painting by her family, her father
opposed it, her mother encouraged her but despite this she demonstrated skill
and a keen interest in Surrealism after seeing her first Surrealist painting at
the age of ten in a Paris art gallery.
Her shock love in
the 1930’s for the older Max Ernst led her to abandon her comfortable London
life and family and flee to France but their profound artistic happiness was ripped
apart when Ernst was arrested and detained by the Nazis. She fled to Spain and
her experiences and Ernst’s subsequent abandonment as he escaped and fled to
the US with arts impresario Peggy Guggenheim, whom he later married, caused a
full psychotic break. Her parents had her sectioned. According to Carrington and
decoding Down Below, the book she
wrote about her breakdown, both body and mind were shattered, assaulted and
almost eradicated. The use of controversial drugs like Cardiazol and Luminol
had terrible side effects including severe convulsions and treacherous
hallucinations.
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| Foxy's Carrington books... (image © TSF) |
Through a convoluted
series of circumstances she cast up in Mexico and would work and live here
until she died. If you are interested in a more familial side to her story, I
would recommend a book called The Surreal
Life Of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorehead, who wanted to find out more
about this ghost who haunted the memory of the family, an aunt she had known as
Prim who upped and left in 1937. Little did she realise this journey would lead
her to one of the most remarkable women in history. It is a beautiful read, a
closing of blood circles, of conversations, history overlapping and memories
gently lapping on the surreal shores of time.
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| Leonora Carrington Syssigy, 1957, oil on board |
I have loved her
gnomic work throughout my life and as a writer on perfumer I often drawn on
art, literature and poetry as inspiration for my essays. It wasn’t until I
encountered these strange pilgrims of John Biebel that my Leonora Carrington
submersion came welling darkly, wickedly back up.
Carrington’s vast
worlds of mythological and ritualised creatures seem both simultaneously
monstrous and oddly comforting. They are without a maker’s explanation. Sure
there are endless words poured out by art lovers, critics and biographers but
she herself remained remarkably silent on interpretation and meaning allowing
her body of manifold media to have its own authoritative voice.
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| Leonora Carrington Operation Wednesday 1969, Tempera on masonite |
I have an on/off
love affair with Surrealism on the whole though; sadly much of it has become
wrecked by over-exposure and contamination by the charlatanism and rampant ego
of Dali. However, taking time to search amid the hinterlands there is much
broken, haunted beauty, particularly in photography and etching. We are lucky
enough in Edinburgh to have an important gathering of surrealist works
bequeathed to the National Galleries as the Gabrielle
Keiller Bequest. It is a measured and thoroughly erudite connoisseur’s survey
of some the most important names in the movement including Carrington. The
associated Keiller Surrealist and Dadaist books, manuscripts and monographs are
now housed in an enigmatic enclosed ‘library’ room in the Museum of Modern Art.
It is one of my favourite hushed spaces in the city.
The time I spent
with John’s sui generis quartet and the surfaced memories of Carrington’s
dreamscapes collided and merged. Smolderose,
Eiderantler, Selperniku and Vaporocindro
were so preternaturally crafted, they felt alive, crafted with instinct and
experimentation, some small amount of dreaming and a desire to see what happens
when you push and paint over the edges of your canvas.
Carrington’s
universe of cowled, tangled processions, tabled rites and lengths of mystical
oddity in a trademark palette of woven flora, weather, eyes, hands, fur,
trumpets, webs, cages and galleries of gossamer sages have a deeply affective
language the longer you spend in their company. You find yourself lost in
wind-caught hoods like sails on storm-tossed boats, mirrors as beckoning doors,
crescents and minstrels and labyrinths. All have an uneasy mix of portentous
menace and innocence.
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| Leonora Carrington 1948, Le Bon Roi Dagobert Oil on canvas, |
Surrealism is essentially an art of dreams and the
subconscious. The embers, uncertainties and edges of brainscape. Carrington’s denizens
are talismanic, obtuse perhaps and frustratingly inscrutable, yet within the Carrington
world there are pieces of such beauty as to pull rain from clear skies. Much
like my intense scrutiny process with perfumes as I plan and write essays, the
longer I live with and search within, the more I am rewarded. It is one of the
reasons I write less these days as I struggle to find perfumed work that really
makes me think and feel, or has me enjoying the right mix of words to convey
the precision and mysteries of beauty.
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| John Biebel |
In bed one night
before sliding into sleep I looked through books on Carrington, the silence of
night and low light a perfect atmosphere for her haunted priestesses, acolytes
lost in tunnelled cowls, eyes reflecting loss and organic protocols,
crescent-moon faced deities dancing, anointing and simply watching with quiet
intent. The tableaux seem so ghostly to me, her people haunted by Carrington’s
own turbulent and fractured journey to a place of sanity and fecund creation.
Amongst this I feel oddly at home, a world unexplained by its creator and
endlessly explained by others, even a little by me here. It is hard to resist
projection and the arrogance of decoding.
The January Scent
Project began as all things artistic do with curiosity and experimentation. I
think John’s exposure to a diverse range of perfumery as a writer at
Fragrantica combined with the way he creates his artwork gave rise to a
textured and abstract desire to build perverse olfaction. To perhaps challenge
what he had already smelled, laying unexpected materials like colour blocks and
collided hues, making them work by means of calibration, subterfuge,
environment and sheer chutzpah. On paper his formulae seem a little like
madness in places. They remind me a little of the work of Josh Lobb, the
reclusive lost prophet of olfaction at Slumberhouse, but only in the use of
certain materials; the resinous fir, sticky labdanum and that sense of woozy
spatial disorientation that you get when you first spray them. But the
similarities fade there; Josh has always been on a dark journey with his
olfaction. It is an experiment in how materials can be redefined and reimagined
in altered states. He is an astonishing talent but a wary and secluded one and
whether he likes it or not his work is perceived as art, exploring depths,
holes within holes, door-less rooms and the effect light has on captive human senses.
John’s sociability and ability to connect is another key factor in the growing
of his singular perfume concept.
The Smolderose perfume oil is a powerful
thing, a charred rose in a blasted garden as the moon rises. I smelled a borrowed
sample of this rolling around a bottle like age-old floral liqour. The oil is
an examination of the ubiquitous rose/oud dynamic, not necessarily my favourite
of things despite my passion for roses, however John’s careful assembly of a
more cathartic and scorched agarwood against the velveteen genuflection of a
gorgeous rose and rose geranium duo is quite persuasive. The oil medium dictates
a certain depth and linger to the mix and John’s use of honey, castoreum,
tobacco, birch and benzoin all really serve to ease out a sweet smoky drydown,
smeared with petal fragments and shards of citrus.
Using birch in a
scent will instantly impart a sense of vaporous smoulder, but you have to be
careful, even relatively small doses can destabilise formulae and overwhelm any
work achieved. It is a note I must admit to disliking more and more as I get
older. It pierces my senses somehow and flips my migraine switch all too
easily. In trace amounts and used with discretion to create an atmosphere of
empty Siberian forests and day old campfires for examples it might work, but
far too many perfumers, niche and more increasingly high street as well,
attempting to riff on ecclesiastical, oudh and whisky themes are overdosing
synthetic birch materials and the results are invariably pretty poor so your
eyes burn and your head explodes.
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| Smolderose (Image © TSF) |
Smolderose eau de parfum. How much do I love this fucking thing? I am obsessed with its odour of blood red roses ignited and charred on pyres along secretive night beaches. I return to it over and over, worrying my skin to exhaustion.
…elderflower, damask rose, roasted seashells,
saffron, frankincense. More of a recipe for binding, blind love and burial.
I was so intrigued to know how the roasted seashells would smell; I couldn’t
really imagine how John had done it. I don’t think I will ever tire of the
sensational head-filling, heart-stopping, skin-thrilling overture where despite
a nominal pyramidal structure, cade oil and labdanum smolder up through harvested damp roses, everything drenched in the
extraordinary saporous marine-stained Choya Nahk, a very unique naturally
processed distillation that combines Himalayan cedarwood and roasted sea
shells. Over and over I am truly wowed by Smolderose,
from its very beginning it smells created, crafted, a composition of loving
difference. A room of burning roses dusted with fleur de sel salt crystals, the
trailing altar odour of frankincense and oily smut of rectified juniper wood.
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| Choyas & fir balsam... (Image © TSF) |
‘What is particularly beautiful about Choya
Nahk is that it really does combine all the aspects of its constituent parts
without taking away or changing them. There is smoke, cedar, the calcified
smell of shells - and then that sometimes barely perceptible but persistent
smell of the sea, or more of a "marine" smell. This fascinates me
because it's a very rare smell to be captured by natural means, and perfumers
go to great lengths to make it artificially, yet there it is in the choya. Also
quite remarkable is how powerful this substance is. A small dose will add a
substantial amount of that sensation of sea and smoke. Finding it was something
of a breakthrough for me, because before this, I was creating smoke smells only
with birch tar and cade oil. These are both beautiful substances, but do not
have the depth and personality of the Choya.’
John Biebel
The Choya takes it
name from the actual vessel it is created in; large specially crafted
earthenware distillation pots with twisted ‘L’ bend pipes to channel off the
condensed product. The seashells and sandalwood are heated together in what is
known as destructive distillation;
the process as you might imagine is very labour intensive but the resulting
yield is incredibly potent, as John mentions above, needing only small amounts
to give personality or background to formulae. John kindly sent me a good link
to a short piece on The Perfume Mistress website, with info on the Choya
processes so do follow and read if you are interested. The Perfume Mistress: attars & choyas
Cade oil is a
wickedly volatile material, brutalist in smoke-concerned compositions. It is
the dark oily tarred residue that results from the destructive distillation of
a juniper, Juniperius oxycedrus to be
exact. Calibration and an innate understanding of how it interacts with other
materials are vital. It tends toward the rugged, cowboy campfire scent, that
odour of night bonfire clothes when fresh sap-drenched wood has been burned. I
find it a less bitter and sarcastic note than birch tar, which has a
distinctive medicinal aroma when used in higher doses.
In the beautiful documentary
Happy People: A Year In The Taiga (2013)
a Siberian hunter make his own reduction of birch tar from sap and bark in the
forest. The boiled down sticky black residue is rubbed over his dogs, his son
and himself to protect them from the voracious moshka or mosquitoes. I always remember thinking: Fuck. The reek of rectified noir tar
coming off his homemade set up would literally kill me. Cade suggests dry brush
fires, popping soft woods and the quiet shifting of hot sands as opposed to the
claustrophobic forest fume of birch tar.
The cade, labdanum
and incense notes in Smolderose wrap
around John’s rose like chewy smoke. There is nothing wasted within the structure
of the scent, notes layering, entwining around the primal carmine thrum. There
is an intriguing sulphurous odour from the Choya that mingles with John’s
beautiful basmati rice saffron note. This adds a distant melt of singed honey
pastries amid the rosaceous fumes.
My skin obsesses
over Smolderose, amplifying the rose
like petrol on flames. One of the things I adore with artisanal perfumers like
John is the sense of feeling connected, his personal imprint is on every stage
of composition. You feel like a ghost in the studio, sniffing close, reaching
for materials and letting your skin take the risk with carnal unmade mods.
The Romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley wished upon his death that his body be burned on a pyre on
a beach, a fitting end for a man of such extraordinary elegiac language. This
brings me to the crux of Smolderose,
my visions of an end, of a night beach fire, embers glowing in the dark salted
sea air. Friends gather around the smouldering woods, sombre faces lit by
conflagration. They have armfuls of roses, a favourite bloom. These are thrown
into the dying flames and for a brief shocking moment a rush of soldered petals
filled the saline darkness.
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| Leonora Carrington The Ancestor |
This sensual wassail
of oceanic rose is Choya Nahk behaviour and I can see why John was so enamoured
of the effect. The dosage used in Smolderose
suggests residue and afterburn, that dark flipside of gourmand you get with
charred rose petals, charcoal sweetness, metallic reduction of booze and burnt
sugar. All these things flicker through this beautiful perfume while a cold sea
mist rolls in, leaving traces of algal dew. I was quite astonished by the
Choya. John was incredibly kind and sent me some samples of various materials,
all meticulously labelled, including a sensational fir balsam extract in
fractionated coconut oil. Oh my. I have been wearing this as a perfume and
mixing it with Vaporicindro. On its
own it has that profound smoky bacon richness and dark glittering malachite
green taste in the nose.
He included three
examples of Choyas; Choya Nahk, the roasted seashells material he used in Smolderose, Choya Loban, a rooty
shadowed frankincense distillation and Choya Ral, a distillation of the Sal
tree, Shorea robusta, which produces
a distinctive resinous leathery-amber material often used in Russian leather
and gentleman’s classic fougère compositions. All three have powerful odour
profiles and require a slight adjustment to the way I smell. I have written in work
about Mandy Aftel, Hiram Green and Tanja Bochnig at April Aromatics how
infinitely more connected I am to natural perfumery now after so much illness
and personal trauma. The treatment of raw materials, in particular floral
notes, seems so much alive and vital to me. I recently revisited the
ecclesiastical organic work of Rodney Hughes, whose rich, swirling perfumes at
Therapeutate thrilled me all over again and reminded me I must write on them.
These Choyas have this rawness of emotion and ability to halt you, suspended in
smoky magic for a while as your senses navigate the origins and nuances.
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| redbrokenrose (2017) (Image © TSF) |
The Nahk has fresh
oysters on a BBQ odour, the shellfish brine sizzling up and falling on to the
glowing embers. It is a very particular smell and one I’m not sure I even like,
but I still can’t stop smelling it. Mark Constantine created an astonishing
thing in 2012 called Lord of Goathorn
for the revived Gorilla Perfume line. I loved it. Many did not. A mix of
seaweed, basil, anisic tarragon and an amazing licquorice note. I’m not gonna
lie, the overall effect was initially quite shocking, gut-wrenching in fact. It
haunted me and when I reviewed it described how the fish-bone, burnt seaweed
and charred damp sand vibe was in fact the odour of Scottish west coast and
island kelp pits, burning seaweed to produce potash or soda for the glass
industry. Lord of Goathorn isn’t
exactly subtle but it does have the most beautiful dark, cindered drydown. You do
have to battle through that overture of singed kelp, but you will never smell
anything like it.
I mention Lord of Goathorn because when I unscrewed the lid of the Choya Nahk I had a
similar visceral reaction. Extraordinary. The condensed essence of a seared
reef of shells is magnificent and a salted breeze wet with marine brine you can
taste as you walk a windswept coast. The great burning beauty to Smolderose is the daring communion
between this anomalous distillation and the lush damask rose. It creates a huge
cascade of emotive floral effects, ably supported by chewy patchouli and sambucus nigra, or black elder, which I
think might explain the jammy, smashed fruit facet that comes at you with ferrous
rose and oud when you first spray the perfume on. There is just enough bergamot
in the top end of the construction to put the brakes on the rose rush; but
everything in Smolderose flows rhythmically
around the deep smokiness of the marine-haunted rose.
Smolderose travels and metamorphoses with joyful power. It is not a hugely
packed scent, but…and it’s a big but,
each of John’s materials has beautiful weight and life. He has arranged them boldly;
aware that each of us will smoulder with difference perhaps allowing us to
imagine a Carringtonesque figure of red darkness, trailing a cloak of scorched
roses wanders a landscape strewn with shells and sandcastles. In the distance a
shimmering wave seems to eternally loom, ready to wash everything away. Pieces
of crimson paper fall as he moves, turn into birds and fly away. All is
intoxication and dream.
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| Eiderantler(Image © TSF) |
Eiderantler is a green rush of discarded moist brick walls, ivy gone rogue
and lavender lovesick with bees in a lost feral garden. Atrophying fir cones
and a wash of abrasive antiseptic mingle with creamy floral notes and sticky
sweet resins.
Eiderantler is described as an ivy fougère, which is an interesting term
but one that has resonance. I like the creeping exuberance of hedera or ivy; its ability to
greenswarm, claiming walls, fences and trees with is various shades of bottle
green palmate leaves. It can be viewed as decorative but I have never seen it
like this, it the foliate miasma of nightmares, not exactly parasitic but still
removing light. It has a strong hold over Eiderantler,
a cloak of a thousand woven leaves.
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| Ivy (Image © TSF) |
For me though
initially it is the lavender that raises its bruised aroma from ancient fields
to gaze at us. Any nascent chill is balanced by elemi and soft hay. Eiderantler does smell angry in places,
a breathing rhythmic vexation played out in lithe contrasts of lavender, rooty
vetiver, magnolia and aromatic oakwood. It suggests a forceful verdancy that
has grown unfettered for centuries.
In a Carrington
dream I see a sea of stags inexorably raising their heads from misty grass.
Their velveteen antlers draped like baroque chandeliers with trailing leaves,
strips of moss, water lilies and tendrils of ivy. This eerie image rises up
each time I wear Eiderantler; it seems like an elegant almost stately
chypré reaching thing, despite the hissy mood swings, but there is something
off, a sense of alteration. In the dream, the stags become men in bone crowns
walking in a landscape of blasted trees, dust settling at their feet like so much
emerald mulch.
In my notes, when I
first received the trio I made reference to the fact I considered Eiderantler the weaker of the three (at
the time) perfumes. But I wear them all so much, my familiarity now with Eiderantler’s beauty made me realise how
deceptive and erroneous my original impressions were. But that is how I work.
Record everything. Be honest. Revisit everything and be ruthless. It was only
after two weeks of skinloving I noticed the sudden obvious sweet wine booziness
that bloomed so fabulously in the heart of the scent; a golden, viney Sauternes
lilt to the notes that plays so beautifully against the oncoming green lit headlights
of cashmere musks and hay.
Wearing it sometimes
as it spreads out on my skin, I get the scent-sensation of something moving in
that secret garden, leaves swirling inside a tattered hood. There is gauze and veil
over bracts and buds on scattered loam. An odour of naked skin moving
lasciviously through blades of grass engraved with snail trails and dawn dew. All
this obsessed over later in the gloom of a disordered room.
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| Selperniku(Image © TSF) |
Selperniku is perhaps the most enigmatic of the original trio of pilgrims,
a jilted bride, not vengeful but lost and seeking absolution. It is a shrouded
gourmand for the shattered and bereft. If you look upon her as she walks he
ritualised landscape of broken china and rendered raiment you might notice a
blur to the edges of her manoeuvres, a sense of neuroses repeated endlessly.
Shedding tears over spilled milk. Never has this adage sounded more vivid. Selperniku must leave the altar in
search of obfuscation and erasure.
I may have my
passionate heart bleed for Smolderose
but Selperniku has such hauteur and
creamy quiet. Faced with such silence, all you can do is listen.
Only a handful of
fragrances have really created something on a par with the perturbing sensory seesaw
recipes of salt, sweet, acid, butyric, milkiness and floral confrontation. In Selperniku John has succeeded in adding
an edge of white butter mingled with floating stone fruit, in this case apricot
or peach. Oily green cardamom and the licquorice shrubbiness of immortelle seem
to destabilise and force beauty at the same time.
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| Image for Onder de Linde I created for FB post |
The lovely Spyros
Drosopolous at Baruti created the utterly crazy/beautiful Onder de Linden (formerly Melkmeisje)
as a sunlight & lime blossom hymn to Amsterdam. There are gorgeous moments
of pear cooked in butter and salt cast with hand-crushed white lilac in all its
shuddering cold grace. I always marvel at its strangeness, its ability to hold
me fixed in honeyed wonder.
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| Fundamental by Rubini (image © TSF) |
The other oddity is Fundamental by Rubini, a project
involving the delightful Andrea Rubini, writer and perfume specialist Ermano
Picco and talented perfumer Cristiano Canali. Fundamental is for my money one of the most original and finest perfumes
to have appeared in recent years and a key fragrance in the resurgence of
Italian niche perfumery. The risk and ingenuity of Fundamental was thrilling; writing about is brought me immense
pleasure. Its very incorrectness produced exquisite audaciousness. Notes of
white local white grape and the attendant Noble rot (Botrytis cinerea), dirty boudoir powder, beeswax candles in old
Italian churches, vetiver, woods and a joyful explosion of tangerine. Just a
wonder and makes me so happy every time I wear it.
On paper, both Onder de Linde and Fundamental shouldn’t work, but it is the challenge of being made
to feel unsettled and all the moments of unexpected beauty in such agile and
audacious olfaction that reward us. There is allure in all. Selperniku shares the same startling and
defiant ability to engage. Mr E. also reminded me of Eau Clair des Merveilles by Jean-Claude Ellena for Hermès in 2010,
a salted vanilla concoction that had a distinctly faecal edge at certain times,
like diapers doused in cake mix and crowned in aldehydic floral light.
Parts of Selperniku feel blind; the hissy cypress
and juniper seem scattered and out of focus amid the milky roaming. But again
it kinda succeeds. That camomile note though. It is simultaneously commanding
and troubling. I can’t quite decide if John has overdosed it purposely or if
the immortelle acts like an amplifier. It’s a note I normally associate with
the scent of certain organic skin care lines and therefore I do struggle with
it. And do not even get me started on camomile tea, a brew that freezes me in
horror just by its very existence.
The butter facet
really starts to warm up about half an hour into application just as the
tobacco winds up. This isn’t an overtly smoky scent however; Selperniku has the mellifluous flavour
of air-dried blond tobacco that adds a suggestion of rolling, match-flare and moist
roll-ups. The subtle smear of dairy is deftly controlled, it feels almost
accidental, something that came out of the milk/latone and sandalwood
materials. But whatever the genesis, mixing it on skin with ripened apricot,
spices, fougère notes and the spiky citrus of petitgrain is both savage and
comforting. I am dazzled by it and also a little disrupted. Selperniku wears like three perfumes in
one, each of them flowing in and around one another with strange ease. John has
great control over his materials, much like his paint, aware of how things
might or might not cohere. Using skin as canvas is a bigger risk, as each is different,
as we all interpret the notes in our own way much as we decode and process the
colour palette and symbolism in a finished artwork. There is intangibility in
all four January Scent Project perfumes and this is a good and fascinating
thing.
The queasy dialogue
of this twisted gourmand pilgrim will always be one of dislike and craving;
shuddering and falling on the bottle like the skin of a returning lover. The
final stages are lovely, white and opaque, the fruit drops to malleable
chalkiness and the perfume has the gentle texture of a whitewashed window where
the pigment has faded, leaving behind a brume of particles on the glass.
The instinctive
surrealism of John’s techniques and imagination is outstanding. You can sense
the joy and genuine interest he has in his craft. He is making no great claims
about his status as a perfumer, it is not a hobby as such, the work is too damn
beautiful for that, but creating olfaction of this quality and singularity
while working and maintaining a career as a painter and his day job proves the
sheer dedication he has and also the addictive pull of artisan perfumery. His
modesty and generosity are rare moreish things and for now I think January
Scent Project is just that, a project where John explores his abilities to
manufacture worlds that smell of astonishment.
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| Vaporocindro |
Now I must confess
this essay has taken me much longer than I thought, partly because I was side-tracked
by photography and the weary machinations of pain management but also because
John launched Vaporocindro, a scent
of ashen lilacs and I couldn’t decide if I should just post the essay without
my thoughts on this crazy sensuous scent or take my time because it is a
labyrinthine aroma that I needed time to live with.
I opted to wait and
spent a month in Vaporocindro. It was
worth the pause and scrutiny. Again John has taken a risk trying to marry the
oily suffocation of an imagined (to my nose) blue lilac and smoke. It has the
most intense openings of all four of John’s perfumes, a huge green chocolate
zoom with shards of coffee. The lilac is glorious, shockingly photorealistic
for a moment before fracturing into abstraction. The tight flowers smell
indigo, bruise blue, their scent deliciously assisted by the black pepper, a
scent of spongy dried apple rings and the reverential surge of jonquil with its
honeyed earth tones that John has used to really emphasise the narcissus/lilac
personality of this very unique perfume.
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| l i l a c |
The lilac note
really is something. It is not the ephemeral haze of Olivia Giacobetti’s En Passant, but a more robust
inflorescence of hypnotic panicles. The scent of lilac (syringa vulgaris) varies from species to species and I always, always stop and smell lilac when I see
it. The scent ranges from almonds and wet eggshell paint to rose jam, raw comb
honey and mulchy white lilies. John’s lilac note is this BOOM…chocolat vert… Green beautiful
chocolate. Bitter cocoa meets absinthe. The fullness of this doesn’t last too
long, just long enough to startle and reset your perceptions of how a floral
perfume might be made and indeed develop on skin.
Thankfully the
listed blackcurrant is underplayed. I can sense it’s creeping, hedgerow
pissiness in the sharp high shriek of lilac overture where for a suspended
moment Vaporocindro smells like a
olfactive papercut before the green chocolate explodes. Davana usually adds
sort of rummy boozy note to compositions; here in conjunction with a very dry
sandalwood and cumin combo, its laid back smoothness works beautifully against
the furious garden of opening lilac.
The oud takes it
time to smoulder and reduce the lilac to fragrant ashes. The eerie burn uses
turmeric to ramp up a sensation of strange aridness. The singed lilac smells of
burnt plastic, powder and scorched sap. This transition from violent floral to
haunting incense haunted by the flowers burned is the whole raison d’être of Vaporocindro, vapours of cinders if you fancy. John never once allows his perfume
to lose its key personality of sacrificial syringa
vulgaris.
The Vaporocindro Pilgrim walks a landscape
of abandoned ornamental gardens, their formality scoured by mauve dust storms.
He carries a burning bouquet of tumbling lilac blossom, trailing an odour of
strange and recurrent magnitude. If you are privileged enough to see him, he
will be a creature of mist and grain, barely visible against the rocks,
courtyards, caves and lakes, except for his incandescent bouquet. There are
sparks of charred blossom I just adore, mixed with fresh oily petals and the
rush of finger-rubbing leaves and petals. As the end nears the coffee note
flickers and I like the salted transparency of ambergris in the base. It smells
like the tinctures that Cécile Zarokian uses, which are incredibly beautiful.
She used them in her work for Panouge and the Jacques Fath collection. Any measured
and expert use of ambergris tincture will impart such a velveteen curtain drop
on your scent and Vaporocindro is no
exception.
As is my want, I
wore Vaporocindro to bed and after
seven hours of fitful sleep I woke to an inner wrist still tinted with traces
of lilac smoke. The Pilgrim reverts back to the ghosts of these addictive
haunting flowers. He sits a table of glass, wearing a veil of palest indigo
that flows onto the floor like water. Beyond him trees flame as lanterns for
the weary, ashes dropping to the ground, building up like banks of snow.
So I completed this
quartet in wonderment, so deeply delighted I have John Biebel’s work in my
collection. I need to add a bottle of Vaporocindro
and I am complete. Each time I return to Smolderose,
Selperniku and Eiderantler I
revel in the innovation, freshness and challenge of the odours. The charred
seashell and damask rose drama of Smolderose
is perhaps the most intriguing effect I have smelled all year. The
claustrophobic lavender-soaked intensity of a secret garden, walls carpeted in
ivy, hands wrecked from tearing at vines to find a door; all this in Eiderantler with dream stags and their
antlers draped in battle greenery. And milky, smeared Selperniku I view through old misted glass, an utterly unique
experience of salt, ghostly butter, stone fruit and tobacco; a perfume that
both confronts and entices.
Pilgrims in blasted
landscapes, enigmatic, singular and richly imagined. They wander olfactive plane
that will seem unfamiliar and odd to some, emotionally connective to others.
Great perfumery for me is about recognising a creator’s genuine joy, pride and
intelligence in his olfactive world. And beauty, there has to be beauty. We all
have our own markers so we will all wear, react to and interpret John’s work in
different ways.
The surrealism of
his olfactive assembly is profoundly beautiful, daring and amusing. This sort
of thoughtful perfume making is rare. I will sign off this late essay saying
how much I enjoyed writing it, despite struggling at times with words to quite
do John’s work justice. So, stained in Smolderose,
I rest my tired, tattooed fingers and wait for sleep.
For more information on John Beibel and January Scent Project, please click on the links below:
©TheSilverFox
24 December
2017
