Floyd

Someone has been here, just a moment ago. A moment has remained. A table in the sparse kitchen in the morning. A still life in cool streaks. You still have to get used to the silence, with the dust floating in the light above, with the silvery steam flags of chai tea aromas, nutmeg and cardamom echoing from the leftovers in the cups, cinnamon-brown residues like resins, over the traces of days gone by, bitter herbs and bay leaves on the old wooden top. The pepper mill has fallen over. Not now, but at some point. There is the wilted smell of jasmine, littering your skin with wrinkles. You pause in the amber at the bottom of the cups. A moment seems trapped in it. Some time has just left the room.
**
Kevin Peterson from Sfumato in Detroit, Michigan, uses only plant-based raw materials for his Artisan fragrance creations. He is convinced that humans have created a kind of collective olfactory memory over the course of evolution, whereby natural fragrances are able to develop and transport subtle stimulus reactions over thousands of years. Natural scents are therefore time capsules.
"Gravitas deepens, and deepens with thought" writes Peterson on his homepage, and the fragrance does indeed strike many associative chords in its very subtle way. First there is cool spiciness (black pepper), which releases bitter green, clove-like bay notes and a little coriander under tart citrus traces (mandarin), before cardamom, nutmeg and the cinnamony Peru balsam in the heart are reminiscent of chai tea. With coffee and cardamom in the pyramid, I was actually expecting more of a Berber coffee aroma. Benzoin then carries the fragrance further into a medicinal balsamic base. Discreetly idolic jasmine occasionally evokes distant thoughts of old skin, slightly musty, but strangely enough not unpleasant. A full-length, bitter-tart time capsule that closes over warm, spicy aromas in amber.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOkpzHZb-b4&t=5s

You awaken from everyday life as if from a dream in a glistening dawn of ice-blue eyes. The eucalyptic breath of essential oil lamps. The cold breath of camphor and thyme. There is a shadow, a medicine man. He fans the room with tufts of straw to cleanse your spirit. He murmurs Madagascar as he does so. Gradually you close your eyelids. You look at them again from the inside, the sharp shadows of salty mists, the clay-colored smoke on indistinct grasses, the pine resins woven into images of paths of cinnamon-brown amber. You linger in hazy veils.
**
The fact that Mark Sage deliberately explores previously untrodden paths with the creations of his Clandestine Laboratories is also evident in "Silver". Here, the focus is initially on Cinnamosma fragrans, a plant from Madagascar that is better known in this country as Saro and from whose leaves, twigs and bark an antibacterial, antiviral and clarifying essential oil is extracted, the scent of which is reminiscent of eucalyptus and camphor. Supported by cool mint, spicy thyme, herbaceous lavender and green pepper, it initially cleanses the airways almost medicinally for quite a while before the dry strawflower leads it over earthy-smoky nuances (vetiver, patchouli) as well as spicy pine resins and lichen into an accord of salty-smoky ambergris and subtly cinnamony-balsamic styrax. A medicine of moderate projection and evening-filling effect.

(With thanks to Bloodxclat)

Logbook of the sloops. Upcoming shore leave. A couple of squeezes of lime against tropical mosquitoes. A last sip of bitter bay rum, lost drops behind the ears. Smells of numbing pain from the cloves. Like clouds of smoke over flints. They are probably cleaning the barrels of the pepper guns below deck, polishing the balsam-wood stocks with pungent mace.
You can already see the white beaches. Tonka grains dance in the warm wind, soon begin to shimmer in the sun, becoming tiny sweet thousand-pearls on driftwood made from dark vanilla pods. Their scent flows over the rough floors, creams the planks of the old cabins. I will give the bay a name and then we will move on. My Bonnie is over the Ocean.
**
It took a few years for Stephen Dirkes to open another chapter of his Euphorium Brooklyn brand with "Bay Rum", whereby the house even bears the name Euphorium West Indies on the label for this fragrance and has thus relocated its headquarters on paper (!) to the Caribbean.
The fragrance opens with a few splashes of tart, fresh citrus notes (lime, petitgrain) on a spicy accord of bay rum, mace and allspice, which brings to light slightly bitter-hot aromas of cloves and pepper as well as warm, smoky notes. Balsamic amyris wood, which in itself smells a little like creamy sandalwood, vanilla and benzoin, then forms the link to the base of rather dark vanilla and sweet almond-vanilla tonka bean, which initially balances out the bitter-spicy notes, but then unfortunately swallows them up as it progresses, which makes the fragrance a little too creamy-sweet for me in the long run. Rather not for olfactory freebooters. However, this moderate evening excursion to the Caribbean can be a pleasant alternative for the winter.

The day flows light gray through the leaded glass windows onto the high pipes of the reed stops, like narrow beams of light in a sharp hatching. Their cool sound swirls the waves of incense above the mouths. Their bodies of tin let notes shine, the deeper labdanum keys become waves of bright overtones that waft through the old walls in clammy spices and hesperides to condense in patches of light on the cedar pews. The noteheads are resin pots with flags of pepper veils. Your eyes close over your fingers to breathe in the scent of their sounds.
**
The fact that the multi-talented Filippo Sorcinelli came into the world of fragrances through his training in sacred music and tailoring vestments for Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI is evident not least from his Unum series, which was originally designed to scent church vestments, and his Extrait de Musique series, which is dedicated to the various organ stops.
"Trompette 8" is dedicated to one of the oldest stops. This stop has a particularly clear and distinctive sound due to the pewter alloy of its high pipes (see also the picture I uploaded) and, as the name suggests, is intended to imitate a trumpet. In fact, the pyramid reads as if you want to play the keys from left to right, starting with the lower notes, sharply and clearly margined by the spices you slide your fingers to the higher notes.
The scale begins here with a spicy, light grey of black pepper, in whose clammy shimmer clear chili notes are perceptible, which makes the underlying labdanum appear more like a brownish coloration of old lead glass windows, the sweetness skillfully balanced. The incense is also bright and cool, dominating from start to finish, not least due to the citrusy elemi. The bergamot also plays an increasing role in this. The cedar is subtle, blue and cool and is noticeable in the base alongside the somewhat spicier pink pepper
The overall effect is harmonious, cool, hesperidic and resinous, spicy and only subtly smoky. However, it does not have the penetrating power of a trumpet register, the fragrance remains rather moderate to close to the skin and only for a few hours, which I really appreciate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=IdoaLxK2-M4

How long has it been dark? How many days have I been in the shed? Northern lights flicker in green waves through the steamed-up windows with the clammy floors. They run over the paint cans, the old car tires. There are still fir trees from distant days, gone in summer, long forgotten, taking gnarled root through cracks in old paint buckets. Lichens flow from their needles like branched amoebas made of turpentine, meandering like living organisms over removed back benches, patched with oily leather rags, the freshly painted wooden walls. They stare out of the windows with me. To where the freezing damp meadows spill out into the boreal night with the wet asphalt of the streets. You can imagine all sorts of things. There are no transitions to be seen, only condensing warmth over the breathing backs of wild silhouettes.
**
Fischersund, the label of Jón Þór Birgisson, the singer and guitarist of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, also sells art objects in addition to its own fragrances. The house sees itself as a walk-in work of art, subject to constant change. It is "a place where people can come and rest in their senses, a space that communicates directly with your senses, be it through smell, sound, touch or taste." The fragrances of the dark 'Skammdegi' series (No.23, No.54 and Flotholt), create diffuse, cool images of barren Nordic landscapes.
"No.54" seemingly combines the geosmic smell of damp earth, wet grasses and spicy lichens of the boreal night with this art workshop. The natural, fresh-green aromas literally blur with synthetic wood varnish and color notes, releasing the bright smell of turpentine, which somehow seems to get lost in the resinous needles and woods of fir and the petrol-like, smoky roots of vetiver. Somewhere there are a few old car tires, water flows from the meadows over wet asphalt, which blurs with discreetly urine-like notes (ammonia) in leather and animal musk, always remaining diffuse, as if one smells all this in an oily rag with which one has smeared the overall picture. For me, this is the most fascinating scent of the house with a certain addictive factor.