Rectal Raiders Volume 3 (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Isfarkand Elixir, by Ormonde Jayne
Isfarkand Elixir (2019, Geza Schoen)—a citrus-woods abstraction whose vetiver and oakmoss are so thoroughly stripped of all mildew-forest insinuation, leaving little more than a stylized minimalism of metaverse transparency (cold and austere and monotonous, like the brutalist architecture of in the “egalitarian utopia” of Soviet Siberia, but as luminously melancholic, as disquietingly beautiful, as a Scandinavian glacier), that it almost seems as if the result of Quentin Bisch’s latex hand putting a hyperfuturistic twist on Ensar’s 1984, stripping down the woody-green-citrus naturalism more than even the Terre d’Hermes’s trigger-minimal blueprint would call for—
opens with sword-glinting citruses (tart-tangy lime, bitter-tea bergamot, airy-sweet mandarin) very similar to—and even better than—what I get in Areej’s Forbidden Flower but here whose science-lab fluorescence (a near-grapefruit aroma that, despite the green-apple static on my tongue telling me the enormity of its empty-volume radius, it is hard not to go anosmic to) makes it seem—unlike with the more embodied Areej—as if designed to be pumped through the verdox-filtered ductwork of a VR office space (as cold, as placid, as the stainless steel imagery of Baudrillard’s Cool Memories) to maintain the everything-is-just-fine morale of avatar suits in their Roblox cubicles,
the vetiver-cedar-moss combo underneath the matrix bytes of citrus-bitter gin stripped of virtually all its rooty-barky-mushroomy-smoky naturalism (although I will say that a thin tether to earthiness whispers in the moss’s impression of pale green fuzz over cold gray stone) and smelling less like the wood of an actual Norwegian spa (a spa whose sauna whisk is primarily juniper branches and whose aromatherapy blend is rich in pink pepper cooled by the invisible hand of iris) than like the smell of that same wood as filtered through an olfactometer (a device that, in our euphemism-necessary clinical-bureaucratic future heralded by this fragrance just as much as by Ganymede and Purpose, will enhance our immersion in the neuromancer voids of William Gibson’s prophesy)—
the overall effect being a synth-centric woody-green aromatic whose radical inoffensiveness (its ultra-white emptiness, its emotional flatness and rectangular monumentality, nailing the late-capitalist cityscape of Norway’s icy-detached-clinical-geometric-steel-reserved-atheist-digital Bodø much more than Iran’s sunbaked-soulful-ornamental-poetic-stone-sensual-religious-analog Isfahan from which the fragrance’s name derives) interestingly folds over (the horseshoe theory in action) into something much more gin-tinged and low-vitamin-D introspective, a side I have grown to appreciate more robustly as my brain learned to hear the dog-whistle pitch of these aromachemicals with further wearings (aromachemicals, blatantly lab-like as they are, that bring a loveliness that has only lasting power in common with the repulsive affronts to perfumery we now smell everywhere, and can experience in most exaggerated form in Gualtierri’s work);
the overall effect being, in other words, a suicide-pod fragrance so hypermodern in its ethereal ambience of antiseptic lyricism, so meditative in its industrial spectrality of iso-e-super gracefulness, that it feels hollowed out (like the emotionally-muted, loneliness-in-4k, voice of a tech billionaire) and even haunted (like a soft melodic synth line, perhaps playing in one of those UFO-looking Nordic suicide pods, whose disconnection from any percussion or bassline evokes unplaceable emotions of loneliness) and yet for that reason, intimidating in its emotionless minimalism, endlessly alluring and nearly perfect for what it is (for reference I would sell Forbidden Flower before I would sell this),
its spooky tundra-silence (sterile light instead of decayed loam, metallic shimmer instead of perineal funk) merging with its hotel-skin genericness (Sysco lotion but in the lovely Ormande Jayne way) movingly enough to make me think (at least when caffeinated) of the contemplative scene in Lost in Translation where Scarlet Johansson’s character (Charlotte, a young and adrift newlywed unsure of her marriage and purpose) stares down at a dawn-gray Tokyo skyline from the ultra-modern luxury of her high-rise hotel room as Squarepusher’s “Tommib” plays (this being a liminal moment, right after the turn of the millennium, just before the scrollable smartphone arrived like an angel to save us from falling into moments of melancholic reflection).
*Let's workshop this poem about how a young child's desire is formed by a stepdad's pornography use in her presence, covered by the moral alibi of a blanket too thin even to muffle the cumshot aromas.
Rectal Raiders Volume 3
Her third dad would put her head under the sofa blanket, spit strokes clicking to porn,
and she knew—before any starlet told her to smack the balls in her vision—his moans
cursing bread aromas were too buttery not to swirl herself to that DVD alone at night.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
