03.Apr.1968 Rundholz Parfums 2012

Chaotic ultimate burning acidic incense plus peculiar floral fruity sticky theme.
03.Apr.1968 is an exquisite fragrance exclusively for a particular perfumania whom you cannot satisfy to rate stars to the ordinary stuff on shelves of Sephora.
This perfume is a melancholic avant-garde upper class fashion mate with burning resinous sweetness, nutty gourmand, smoky floral, distorted beauty and intellectual minimalistic yet massive structure. Out of perfume world, it's in the very content of streets.
9/10

Arturetto Landi is obviously a perfumer who likes to balance out bitter resins with mulled wine and stewed fruits. I bet he is the kind of man who would never take his morning espresso without something dolce on the side, an amaretto or a ricciarello perhaps. My kind of man, in other words.

What Landi has done with 03.Apr.1968 is to take the minimalist structure of church incense and flesh it out with a gaudy array of rich, bitter, and tooth-rottingly sweet flavors. It smells like a fat wodge of Christmas cake doused in brandy and set to burn on a priest's censer alongside a hulking lump of frankincense. Underneath these smoky, soiled-fruit aromas, there is an enticing whiff of heliotrope, a huge purple chunk of marzipan charred at the edges. Smoke fights with burned sugar, and we all win.

The fruit, in particular, is what makes this incense smell unholy, so unclean. It is supposedly lychee, but really it could be any fruit - apples, raisins, dates - because the fruit is so close to collapse that all you can smell are the high-pitched alcohol fumes of decay that belong exclusively to fruit. Joined with a phenomenally dry, dirty frankincense that flits queasily between clove and bay leaf, the fruit is anything but wholesome.

Many people have compared 03.Apr.1968 to the late, great Norma Kamali Incense, and yes, there is most certainly a kinship. The frankincense used here is similarly dry and almost stale, lacking all the fresh lemony/pine-like nuances usually associated with frankincense. Reacting with the fruit, booze, and sugar, the frankincense takes on the spicy bitterness I associate with copal resin, which along with smoky labdanum is what gives Norma Kamali its unique character.

But in truth, 03.Apr.1968 occupies the same general category of incense as Norma Kamali rather than smelling exactly like it. They are both fatty and overstuffed, the very opposite of the crisply tailored haikus of Comme des Garcons. They are both rather dirty and unwholesome - the type of thing to wear to a bacchanalia rather than to church. But nothing really smells like Norma Kamali Incense. And that's as it should be. However, for my money, the puffy, burned sugar heliotrope touch makes 03.Apr.1968 makes for an easier wear.

I just dug this out of the sample drawer when hunting for a Jar fragrance. I can see why this might be compared to NK but it is only a small part within that bears the incense section resembling it. The rest is a heliotropic sweet floral biggie with a good incense twang. There are lots of seemingly dried fruits and raisins. The drydown gets closer to NK. It is reminding me enormously of the hippie oils of the late 70's but has a cedar-ish doughy fermented quality that keeps it more modern. I'm now being strongly transported to eating raisin and cinnamon bagels whilst sitting in a wat. This is pretty enormous just for one skinny little frankincense note which normally has a sharper quality than this one seems to. I'm smelling a huge support act here of something akin to a hydrocarboresine. Heliotrope can be pretty huge though, but there is an undercurrent here that smacks of rubber underwear. This is lychee, heliotrope, frankincense, I reckon some spice and an extra tight laced up corset ducky. Those three ingredients are not shouting this loud without a megaphone. The perfume is quite pleasant if you like these sorts of resinous whoppers.

An opening fresh whiff of lychee is followed by a beautiful velvety orthodox incense that emits a delicately fruity dry smoke and warms with sweet balsamic resin. Its scent changes minimally with time. It lasts all day on the skin, over 12 hours. It's a beautiful incense scent reminiscent of a church filled with Christmas spirit, however, due to its linearity, I rarely wear it to not put me off. Most of the time, a sniff of the atomizer is enough to please me.

This is one of the more authentic church incenses I’ve smelled so far. It gets the balsamic, resinous nature of frankincense right. It’s anticipatory and somber, like the sweetness of a shuddering sob echoing through an empty stone nave. It reminds me of Lent and Advent, the seasons leading up to two holiest days of the liturgical calendar. I grew up in a fairly modern Catholic Church with quite Presbyterian aesthetics, so I loved when that sweet, sad smoke would wash over me. I do get a peepee granny note (sometimes heliotrope can go that way), but that just puts me right back in the pew!