Floyd

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.

Up here, the sky is a diffuse canvas, a green aurora over a ghostly land. Lichens lie on damp ground like fishing nets over the sound. Fog wafts like delicate smoke from hoarfrost in the cool wind. The sparse vegetation blurs. It darkens remnants of light from clammy clay. Where the wild grasses stand. No human has ever been there, elves live and fairies walk. Smell the aniseed-cold breath. It comes from where the trolls live. They hide in the caves before dawn. They say they would otherwise turn to stone. Come, let us follow the green veils, the glowing mists of geosmin.
**
Fischersund is the label of Jón Þór Birgisson, the singer and guitarist of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. In addition to its own fragrances, the store also sells art objects, tea, blankets and more. 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." Father Birgir works the tin cans for solids and packaging by hand, they say. I like that kind of thing. In fact, as soon as you visit the homepage, the warm and spherical sounds of the music transport you to an inner peace of Icelandic remoteness. The perfumes of the house have a similar effect on me, despite a certain amount of sythetics. The fragrances of the dark 'Skammdegi' series (No.23, No.54 and Flotholt), which I will deal with in three reviews, create diffusely cool images of barren Nordic landscapes, earthy and damp, herbaceous green and misty, the smell of geosmin seems omnipresent.
"No.23" was the house's first release and is therefore also the beginning of my journey into the land of nature spirits. Birgisson takes a very pared-down approach here. You enter the damp earth of Iceland for the first time, perceiving sour grasses and loamy roots, aniseed cools the air, flickering like green northern lights in the sky. Pepper provides a certain smoky, foggy tingle at the beginning, like spicy, cool hoarfrost, lightly underpinned by light tobacco leaf. This is followed by a night-filling, moderate to skin-deep fade-out of geosmin, grasses and flickers of aniseed.

The biggest cannabis flowers grow at the end of the green rainbows. Pepe rubbed his eyes in disbelief. Tiny drops of citrus glistened on the jagged, spicy leaves and stuck to his hands. Inspired, he began to grin. In his mind, cypress needles slowly burst in his fingers, beginning to mutate into resinous buds in dark bitter green. A little damp at first, like when the leaves shimmer sourly after the rain, they would soon dry in the sun to become tart herbs and spicy balsam to burn in light green crackling smoke. After several hours, Pepe found himself lying in dried needles on the forest floor and yet he was completely in the clouds
**
"Oracle" focuses on the archaic Mediterranean ritual of purification through the burning of dried sage leaves. The combination of tart citrus fruits, bitter-spicy sage, citric cypress needles, balsamic-smoky juniper berries, the typical smoky spice base - I'm guessing Indonesian clove, Ceylon cinnamon and birch tar again - as well as Omani green frankincense, presumably lemony hojari, evokes associations of fresh, resinous cannabis blossom in me.
At the beginning, the citrus notes merge quite quickly with the needles of the cypress, the almost astringent sage and the smoky juniper berries to form the dark, tart green marijuana flower, which gets its typical balsamic sweetness from the incense resins, which at first seems rather sourly moist - presumably due to the citrus notes - and then becomes increasingly dry, spicy and smoky until it finally forms a dry coniferous forest floor with the aforementioned spice base towards the end. A THC-free retreat for hippie nostalgics, moderate and evening-filling.

In your search for new shores, you look through the flesh of lime tree roots like through a theater glass. You feel no waves, there's just a little salt off the bow in the billowing mists, drops of citrus oils swirling inside like spray from the flora of foreign islands. Take your kaleidoscope, start walking. Cypress crowns appear, disappear in the incense above the beaches, behind them you spy furry soils that rise and fall as they breathe. Bellies of klipshrike-like creatures, warm spicy amber bubbles bursting like flowing slides in honey, slow motion over dirty blossoms writhing on the ground, withering away, becoming one with the resinous earths.
Oh, Fiona, you should see this! All the leathery osmanthus blossoms in silky shimmering beaver dresses. How the resin grains create new images whenever we turn the prism. How the sandalwood planks now drift away to dust, to soft smoke over rotten bark, distant clouds of beluga vanilla reflected in dark amber lakes in the heart of the innermost islands.
**
New Oceans And Meridians (N.O.A.M. Botanical Perfumes) is an olfactory space-time travel agency, leaving familiar shores, creating visually stunning art, surrounding you with faraway places, enveloping you in adventure and being totally wearable. The Swiss label uses only high-quality natural raw materials for its complex compositions. It maintains personal contact with small distilleries, retailers and manufacturers. Once again, it is the rarity of the sometimes expensive materials that forces the small manufactory to limit the edition to twenty bottles.
The fact that you discover new facets every time you wear it is probably the reason for the name. "The Ambergris Caleidoscope" begins with light green, rooty-esperidic notes (kaffir lime, bergamot) over gently animalic-resinous (hyraceum, elemi) aromas. Sometimes it is the neroli that makes its presence felt in the opening with incense resins, interwoven with the ethereal Corsican cypress. Under the subtly salty ambergris, the animal notes soon become somewhat clearer, the warm spicy vegan black musk attar and the hyraceum are sometimes underlined by slightly indolic jasmine, then again by leathery facets (civet, osmanthus). In this phase, the fragrance reminds me of Fiona by TSVGA. A labdanum-like honey initially forms the backbone of the heart alongside the ambergris, alternating with rotten bark (oud) against a smoky background of sandalwood powder, dark vanilla, black sacra incense and various resins. In the base, amber and benzoin in particular form the depth of the lake underneath, which lingers on the skin for a long time. The kaleidoscope is surprisingly transparent and multi-layered in its complexity of notes and remains moderate in its projection.

Dew sparkles on the fingers of the pines. Are a thousand pearls. Needles that freeze. Silver silhouettes of the trunks disappear in harsh earl-gray clouds that still lie silently over the high forests. There you see your thoughts go. You hear twigs cracking under timid footsteps in the clammy bushes. Then you smell the first roots stirring, awakening in the cool, dry ground, which now and again stirs up tiny clouds of cocoa dust. The wind blows cool from the aromatic herbs above the murmuring streams that meander through the meadows down into the valley and fade in the morning light
**
Karyn Gold-Reineke spent many years in the indie fragrance trade in the American Pacific Northwest before founding her label Pirouette in Seattle in 2009. She uses only natural raw materials for her award-winning creations.
This is noticeable not least again in the rather low projection of "Wander Lust", which opens with cool, fresh notes of pine needles that soon become embedded in a mist of tart black tea notes and create the impression of coniferous earl grey. Rosewood passes before the inner nose like the cracking of damp sticks and dark cocoa can be perceived in the distance before spicy, earthy nagarmotha notes take root again in the bright, cool top note and fade out the fragrance in a light, almost mineral way with rather wild-looking spices. I find the sparse but natural understatement of this fragrance very appealing and the name absolutely fitting.

(With thanks to BeJot)