That Siren (ROUND 4)
scent of the day: RealOud Deep Musc, by Phoenicia
RIP David Falsberg. He died Saturday—Dec 13th, 2025. Here we get an an assam with big facets of matchstick-snuffed pelt and straw-filled goat pen in proximity to both hung tobacco and smoke stacks from a metal-smelting factory in some Russian tundra—these facets, in some way or other, reinforced by various animalic ingredients: castoreum boosting the leather and mineral-rich shrapnel facets; civet boosting the feces-cocoa dirtiness of the hay (fudgifying it); jasmine highlighting a sour-fruity fermentation and an alive mustiness of compost hay, mongolian musk adding lanolin to the hide and boosting the fecal-cocao side as well, Siberian musk providing a feel of frost and more magic-marker metallics; hyraceaum—bridging the mineral-rock axis and the animalic-leasther axis—boosts the impression of petrified feces and parched tobacco leaves.
The effect is like Gucci Guilty Absolute plus an oud-hyrax combo that creates an impression on diesel on animal skin. i assume skin graft, which is explicitly supposed to have the bandaid element, is even more like Gucci. You can say this boils down to Bull’s blood plus a Dahn Oud al Shams musty rope indian oud. But that underestimates the punch of the musks and the punch of the hyrax, and perhaps even the oud. Yes, the oud feel is right in the ballpark of Ajmal’s Dahn Oud al Shams and Areej’s History of Indian Oud—that same musty rope and weathered barn wood but with some of the fertilizer chips, especially in the beginning, of Lao Oud. The oud quality is, I think I am experienced enough to say just by smell, perhaps a bit more like the darker Areej than the brighter Ajmal—but, like the Ajmal, it sticks closely too ropiness instead of having the rich nuances (especially fruity and fecal ones) of the Areej.
for anyone who wanted something like GGA with indian oud, and perhaps is tired of the orris-leather combos we get in the Black Knight and Cuir Mauresque or Cuir de Russie, and for anyone who wants indian oud without the seemingly requisite rose alongside—here it is. Musky aspect in form of a leather dustiness, the hyrax and siberian musk doing a lot of the work to bring that mineralic dustiness, comes in deep drydown. I am terribly spoiled by my collection and so it is easy to put this on and shrug your shoulders when the reality is that this sucker is wonderful both in ingredient quality and skill (Falsburgh, although an amateur, made efforts to train and did train alongside some of the great perfumers I look up sot such as Ellen Covey). It is even more odd when I catch myself shrugging my shoulder since at one time this would have florred me as the ultimate scent, giving me that deep bandaid-meets-dettol-meet-rubber leather element and then adding real oud.
at first it was hard for me to get why the musk element was made prominent in the title when it is really the leather oud element that is prominent. But the musk is definitley present. Mongolian reinforces the fudgy fecal chartacter of the assam. And the siberian musk reinforces the coppery twang of the assam and is responsible, with the hyrax, for that tundra mineralic dustiness. And I do sense a animalic-piney musk simiarity to what I get in Prin’s nearly unbeatable Mongolian Mriga, a fragrance that knocks my socks off (and would fail to be a mongolian-musk lover favorite, I dare say, only if they shun all mixed media, which I do not). What that might mean, then, is that Falsburgh—althoguh this might be romanticizing things a bit too much because for whatever reason I don’t see him havign such deep access to musk pods—is prioritizing the skin of the musk pod instead of the more ethereal grain that synthetic musks are trying to replicate. I am unsure actually about my romanticizing hesitation: I see people like Sundar from Amphora using full musk pods—so why do I assume that David, also in the US, did not have had them? David was doing the real-oud thing well before many of the people we regard as trail blazers and, while he might not have been as connected given his geographical location, he had his connections.
*Let's workshop this poem about the struggles of a homeless drunk who, caught in a cycle of despair, finds comforting empowerment in the self-deception that he is just recharging his explosive energies
That Siren
Hoof polish chipped like nails on a goth cutter, thigh soaked and the drunk gumming no curses of denial— the tourist carriage clops off from its corner break.
Crumpled into the marble façade, camo sleeves torn to a vest—he jangles a coffee cup at marqueed sleazoids, their eyes glinting gluttony through Macy’s perfume.
He has to piss bad again from that pit-stop thought pausing inner time, that easy boost: I’m just gathering fuel here, that’s all—that siren making here a home.
“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)
