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Vetiverus is one of the four Avant-Garden Lab fragrances that I recently tested. And it is one that clearly stands out from the quartet ("Veil / Nebula 3 | Avant-Garden Lab / Oliver & Co.", "Nebulae Series - Orion / Nebula 1 (Eau de Parfum) | Avant-Garden Lab / Oliver & Co.", "Ambergreen | Avant-Garden Lab / Oliver & Co.", "Vetiverus | Avant-Garden Lab / Oliver & Co.") due to its - albeit only seemingly - naturalness.

The scent starts off herb-sweet and tarry-smoky: as if one had ripped open meaty, amber-colored dried apricots and immediately enjoyed them by dragging them through a bowl of tar.

This harsh and bitter combination may indeed seem animalistic - it reminds me of Salamanca: but well-balanced with the original version of Bat (2015).

Vetiverus could easily come from the idea box of Dr. Ellen Covey - it appears so surprising compared to the otherwise monothematic and carefree synthetic experiments from the lab of avant-gardener Oliver Valverde.

Tarry smoky notes and bitter, overripe, fruity sweetness create a wonderful and versatile, medium-weight fragrance:

When sprayed on clothing, the first chords get caught in the fabric and freeze.

On the skin, however - after several hours - a green vetiver unfolds with a beautiful osmanthus note. As a hobby nose, I believe I can perceive both notes well, and the long black asphalt path through the humid-warm fruit leather jungle pleases me immensely.

Garnishing tar and smoke with flowers or fruits may no longer be the absolute avant-garde, yet Vetiverus, with its two ignition stages - the beautiful metamorphosis from sweet and pitch-black to green and zesty, is hardly a provocation, but rather a well-thought-out composition.

That "Ambergreen | Avant-Garden Lab / Oliver & Co." had scooped up the judges' accolades with its vegetable freshness is somehow understandable; Vetiverus, it seems to me, did not appear prominently on the radar - unjustly, in my opinion. A remarkably powerful substance, a bold olfactory experiment - and a successful one at that.

It is morning. I get up and go to the kitchen; I decide to make myself some oatmeal. I put the milk on to boil and throw in the oats.

Before I continue, I quickly jump into the bathroom to shave. However, I don't have enough shaving soap, so I simply stretch the remaining bits with some soap flakes. It works quite well and doesn't smell as mossy as usual.

Shortly after, I head back to the kitchen, and I arrive just in time: the milk is boiling, and I manage to lift the pot off the stove - the rising milk foam doesn't spill over the edge - Phew, that was close... Pscchhhht! Pschhhht! A few drops obviously managed to escape. They sizzle on the hot plate and rise in fine tendrils of smoke. It almost went really wrong.

I set the pot down, remove the annoying milk skin, and stir everything vigorously. It can continue. But the olfactory mixture of improvised shaving soap and burnt milk is getting to my head.

I put down the wooden spoon, open the window, and look down at the legs of people rushing by. I take a deep breath. With the cold air, the smell of wet earth and decaying leaves flows in - spring is coming soon, and it rained heavily during the night. The streets are wet, and the cloud cover must be low - it’s quite gloomy out there.

I close my eyes and inhale all these impressions. Good morning. Fantastic.

I, who can’t make sense of floral stuff, am now wearing Celluloid x Galbanum.

There’s little to hear of Galbanum here: that is, if you assume that Galbanum - the “olfactory cry for help from cut flowers” (Luca Turin) - smells green or like a flower shop.

This is the opposite of a flower shop. The scent starts shockingly for me: like the good old 90s toilet spray. Aggressive canned flowers! Sometimes you see them in café restrooms: those scent spray systems that you have to be hellishly careful around to avoid suddenly getting sprayed - they seem to be filled with more moderate stuff.

Jasmine is overwhelmingly present in this clash and only reluctantly lays back.

The celluloid note can only be guessed at. Too bad - that’s what I was hoping for. Campsite, rubber ducks, inflatable boats, 35mm film rolls - none of that in my nose. Just jasmine. Maybe a bit of musk.

But wait, at the very end a hint of synthetics unfolds, and the scent becomes hesitantly more bearable and interesting.

I must say, after the first spray, I wanted to send it back immediately. I looked up how returns for opened fragrances work - of course, it’s not possible.

Immediately, another phenomenon set in, which I had described in another context: the attempt to convince myself that the scent is somehow good, after all, it’s Comme des Garçons. Come on, I just need to understand it. Exactly.

Yes, it’s somehow good if you have a preference for jasmine - maybe. Or if you have the patience to wait for the dry down. I don’t know if we’ll become friends, but I’ll wear you nonetheless - out of protest. In quirky satisfaction.

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P.S.
After a few days, I realized that this is not an “und fragrance” after all, but actually quite an interesting thing. The scent is brutal - that might be off-putting, but in fact, here, synthetics and galbanum, in my impression, are not clashing against each other, but in inseparable unity, like fragrant rubber boots: the boots can be separated, but the scent in the rubber remains. Something different.

I had prepared myself for this scent: read statements, studied comments - some even multiple times. Of course, I also borrowed the Ali Gualtieri documentary (The Nose) on Vimeo. I thought it was great, a very likable guy, incredibly playful, like a child - fascinating! And to frame it all, I searched for a dozen YouTube reviews - in several languages, of course.

And then luckily I had a small Comme des Garçons 2 sample on hand, the supposed scent twin, so to speak.

Many report nearly the same about Blamage, which is quite astonishing and naturally made me feel optimistic: Peach, peach, peach. Cream. Milk and rancid milk. Chemistry, chemistry, chemistry. Petrochemistry. A rose turned inside out, the green on top, in chemistry! Great!

When the scent finally arrived, I made further preparations to approach it safely: this is going to be the true "liquid special waste," I thought, and cautiously sniffed the underside of the bulky, yet light, cap. I shouldn't wear it before eating; either it ruins my meal, or the meal ruins the scent. So better eat first, then apply. And not too much at once - many have warned about that; so really just press lightly on the sprayer. Now. Right away.

Go.

Yes. This stuff works for me up close. No chemical accident that I need to be wary of. No punch, hardly any sci-fi synthetic. Little peach. For me, it is indeed just a softer version of CdG 2.

Blamage was originally conceived as a mistake. And it seems to me that the desire to conceive a mistake is the actual - conceptual - mistake with this scent. Conceived mistakes are controlled mistakes, and they simply do not exist. At least not in the sense that such a mistake should lead to something entirely new, according to the principle of "too many aldehydes" in Chanel No. 5.

One can only stumble into the new. Intentional and unconditional, mind you - that is crucial. Every intention is result control, every condition a limitation of the experiment. Conditions testify to intention. Analysis is paralysis, and interpretation is projection.

The mind works restrictively and is therefore always limited. Because it is limited, it can only think restrictively. The mind struggles with paradoxes. It can neither consciously bring them about nor place its actual role within them. In the "normal case," it operates, following logic, only linearly. It prefers to go in circles to avoid stumbling. Even with synthesis from thesis and antithesis, it doesn't really get far, because a paradox is not a figure of dialectic, but rather something like a quantum physical phenomenon that cannot be measured with compass and ruler.

The mind is limited - but its actual limits are not physical. It is rather a virtual "realm" of linear infinity: a circle from which only a quantum leap of one's own perception leads out - or a true mistake that one must recognize as such, instead of trying to "grasp" or avoid it. Then it is no longer a mistake, but an insight. And thus, one probably reaches the next level of understanding.

That as an artist, what is possible within one's own realm of thought has already been tried out, is evident in that the new increasingly appears as the newly arranged old. Seemingly new, yet not unexpectedly new. Actually not new at all.

If one continues as before, one only spins in that invisible circle - into infinity, if you will. Discipline, endurance, and persistence - the engines of the mechanical-linear world - keep this downward spiral in motion. One becomes increasingly active, and further away from joy. The same applies to the intention to leave this mechanism, for it is intention that grants this realm its linear infinity and keeps the "I" trapped within it.

Outward-directed intention, thus "every action to," is always resistance, i.e., a struggle with what is. The Daoist masters in ancient China also knew this. Therefore, they elevated the thought of "wu wei" (無為 = "not for") - the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese 無心 "mu shin" = here translated as "without heart(blood)" - to a life maxim. For if one removes the outward-directed intention - thus every "to" - it does not lead, as many fear, to aimlessness or uselessness, but to a coherent naturalness and self-evidence: a childlike openness, to which any mental blocks are foreign. Therefore, the path of the wise always led back to being a child, that natural state which was so diligently and painfully unlearned in Confucian society.

Playing is thus the only thing that provides relief. For play knows no intention, is without control and without a goal. Here, the activity itself is its own meaning: it suffices unto itself. If one surrenders to it, the fog of believed boundaries lifts. Eventually.

Well, then I must say, Ali plays like there's no tomorrow! The shining eyes are not feigned; he is fully enthusiastic! I believe him; I can hardly detect any calculation. But that in his play, CdG 2 comes out, is quite strange. Fifteen years after the release of CdG 2, Nasomatto re-invents CdG 2 as Blamage, but not new. Yet in play. Wow! I mean, there's this example that if you let all the monkeys in the world pound on typewriter keys for eternity, eventually a literary masterpiece or at least a large dictionary must come out, so they say. So theoretically-statistically-computationally speaking, right? From that perspective, the probability of blindly reconstructing CdG 2 in just under two years, and without any intention, (at three times the price), is probably close to zero - I don't know. So is it calculation? Or a brilliant mistake?

The packaging states that this product is the result of (bad?) care and poor decisions. But these decisions cannot have been that bad. The very idea of leaving the circle of the mind through conscious "bad" decisions is just another illusion. For conscious decisions testify to judgments, and judgments counteract play because they testify to intentions. A cycle and a trap.

Oh yes.

Blamage is solidly built, that much is certain - I would also wish for the scent to be more aggressive and long-lasting. I had hoped for quite a bit from it - hence all the Bla-Bla. Blamage is certainly not the scent, nor is it a mistake at all.

Sometimes you just have to forget names: buy music by ear, discover books outside of bestseller lists, and with perfume, let only the nose decide - here you can hardly do otherwise, as you have to wear the stuff anyway.

Yet I often observe in myself that there exists a wishful thinking, to too easily grant certain brands acceptance for both mediocrity and the unspeakable.

Olfactory destructive measures thrive on the dialectic of art (or money?): one ultimately does not want to be a philistine. And expensive things are rarely banal. Conversely, the willingness to dismiss the supposedly "nameless" or less popular candidates as lacking genius is all the greater: one must not be a philistine, not in art!

Thus, straw in one person's hands turns to gold: there is the arduous journey of searching for the world's best straw, the lengthy distillation, the path of asceticism, and the pure, unadulterated natural product - the essence of the essential, beautifully captured and offered in tiny quantities. Very exquisite, if you already have everything else. Erase all that and put this product in someone else's hands, and at best, only straw remains: uninspired, simple, musty, unbearable - who wants to smell like that?

Art often seems to be a story we tell each other. And the more unique it is, the scarcer the edition, the more valuable the product.

Much must be theoretically justified with this type of product, and cacophonies can no longer be perceived as such - one just has to know the background of the work. On the other hand, the intellectual growth that manifests in the clear pursuit of olfactory horizon expansions cannot be denied. What was straw can become gold.

Sure, one is chained to their perception, which is by definition judgmental; as soon as thoughts appear as companions to the observed, opinions arise. If one finds themselves outside this mechanism, there is nothing that cannot exist. And that is not an easy exercise.

In pure observational mode, a feared honesty often emerges, which otherwise is reliably obscured by one's own ideas about the supposed uniqueness of the brand: one recognizes straw as straw and gold as gold. But then one is not worth more than the other. Both are art. A nice side effect.

So, more or less successfully, I tried to approach testing Laudano Nero.

My first acquaintance with Tiziana Terenzi was Orion, and out of disappointment, I decided it would be the last. The best part was that my mind immediately shaped Tiziana Terenzi into an amorphous sound structure - with the addition of Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez - which in turn allowed the strange conviction to grow: “Yes, this Tania Turenzi perfume is not so great, but her book is quite good. She can write, but perfume probably not...”
Such arrogance runs deep. Well, Tiziana Terenzi is actually quite something else.

In a blind swap, my first worry was that Laudano would turn out to be Orion Nero. Full of awe during the trial, my relief was akin to enlightenment: Wait a minute, this is good! Yes, but is it really good? Isn’t this Tiziano Turino??! Can he even do that?!

Camphor and bitter green herbs, sweet berries, ash, and cognac - all in an unbelievably grandiose presentation! Judgingly, I continued to combine names and impressions. But to completely surrender to the fragrance, at some point, all this Turino-Turenzi nonsense in my head had to be switched off.

The “decisive arrogance” of Laudano Nero, I would worship at the feet of a grandmaster, while I would likely condemn it as shameless in anyone else. Thank you, upbringing.

So I thought, this could easily be Tom Ford. “Bold” in presentation it is, were it not for its remarkable versatility. Oriental, rich, herbal, resinous. In the end, labdanum and the slightly oily vanilla come to the fore. Ford or not Ford?

This scent is avant-garde for me, similar to what I attribute to the creators of Tonka Fever and Type Writer - even if the olfactory results differ, the mindset seems to be similarly radical.

I recognize fine gourmand parallels to Dolce di Giorno, although Laudano Nero pursues a completely different concept: its dark, bitter side has absolutely nothing to do with desserts.

Compared to Black Afgano, this scent is coarser, but structurally in no way less stable. Black Afgano is more subtly balanced, finer, and more multifaceted - a sensitive poet, so to speak. Laudano Nero is sprightlier and more paradoxical in its overall appearance: a poet and a fighter, if you will - even drunk, he’ll still land a punch!

[…]

Well, if you want to allow yourself the “arrogance” of Laudano Nero, you can throw brands and names overboard in a self-experiment and rid yourself of all the quirky stories; if you go the whole way, you can discover the same for yourself and rethink your own dusty story - don’t you just want to be a name, let alone a brand?