When The Nightlife Review asked me if I could put together another scent mixtape themed around nightlife, there were exactly three scenarios on my mind: perfume for the club, perfume for sex, and perfume for sleep. The few things that matter most between sundown and sunup.
As for nightlife with Vivian, my friends know I’ll have a couple perfume samples on hand if anyone needs a spritz up. And they’ve long been inured to the usual night out greeting, a wrist under the nose and an inquisitive stare, almost always to be answered in the affirmative: “that’s really good.” My favorite part of this ritual isn’t the affirmation, but the inhalation, that moment before they’ve begun decoding the fragrance. That liminal moment when they know the smell without knowing whether it’s “good” or “bad.”
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“Gucci Time” by Gucci Mane feat. Swizz Beatz // Absinth by Nasomatto
Swizz Beatz needs “everybody to report to the dancefloor right now.” When I say I was born in the wrong era I mean it makes me suicidal to think I’ll never be in a roomful of 20-somethings screaming along to this song. Standing in the center of the club, Gucci Mane spills out a slurry of syllables that slip and swerve across a serrulate loop of “Phantom Pt. II” by Justice, airless and adrenalized. “White boy wasted, frat house wasted/Amazing/like my bracelet, I’m flossing/RIP to Mike ice got my chest moonwalking.”
Swizz was introduced to Justice by Pharrell and Q-Tip, who wouldn’t stop calling to ask if he’d checked out the French duo’s music. And there is a synchronicity between, say, the clipping tsunami of “Waters of Nazareth” and the metallic modulation of “I Can Transform Ya,” the impression of a DAW pushed to the brink.
Naturally, the beat to “Gucci Time” feels like kismet: Justice’s sawtooth maximalism is thunderous enough to stand up against Swizz’s preferred mode of production, about as subtle as the Kool-Aid Man. It’s a flush fit for the consumptive hedonism of the club, where labor and libido sublimate happily into profit margins. The catharsis of cash flow seems to spur dopamine even as money comes out of Gucci’s pocket—“I ordered 40 more bottles, why? Have no idea”—American excess.
Absinth by Nasomatto is equally brash, “the result of a quest to stimulate irresponsible behaviour,” sharply green in the nostrils: anise and artemisia, then vetiver bedrock, a splash of citrus. As a child, perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri spent a lot of time around farm animals and manure; you get the sense that his work at Nasomatto is a concerted effort to bring real sensation back to the world of perfume, which has optimized toward skin scent subtlety and aldehydic cleanliness.
Absinthe (the spirit) cuts the bitterness of wormwood with a blend of botanicals: anise and fennel, occasionally hyssop, coriander and mint, among others. Absinth (the perfume) opts instead for minimalist clarity, almost one-dimensional on first spray. The vetiver here is particularly dry and woody, a strong support for verdant Artemisia absinthium. There’s a depth here too that reveals itself further along the evaporation curve, smoldering like alcohol pooling in the abdomen.
Insistent and unyielding, this perfume’s herbaceous buzz mirrors the pitched-up synths swarming under “Gucci Time,” sillage as loud as a Swizz Beatz adlib. In nightclubs heavy with cloying fragrance, why would you want to be the sugar cube when you could be the absinthe?
In nightclubs heavy with cloying fragrance, why would you want to be the sugar cube when you could be the absinthe?
“Focus [Yaeji Remix]” by Charli XCX // Promise by Frederic Malle
Charli XCX is one of the funniest romantics on earth because she will not shut up about cheating on her man and honestly, lowkey feminist. “Focus,” a non-album single loosely detailing a marathon sex session, isn’t exactly about that, but the imperative to “focus on my love” takes on a mildly sinister quality alongside B-side “No Angel,” where Charli is “sorry/that you caught me/cheating in the hotel.”
Luckily, this standalone remix does away with any untoward associations, keeping “100% of your attention” on the main event. Much of Charli’s discography skews hypersaturated, the glamor of always being the coolest girl in the club encoded into bright, hard earcandy. Filtered through Yaeji’s introspective house sensibility, her popstar facade softens, less the object of the fantasy than the subject.
Promise by Frederic Malle is a polarizing effort in the world of Arabian rose perfumes, welding leathery animalic castoreum to a mouth-puckering apple accord, tarted up even further by the presence of isobutyl quinoline, a synthetic compound with a mossy-woody character. Strange bedfellows play together nicely under a more ordinary umbrella of Bulgarian and Turkish rose; despite its eternal sillage, Promise hugs close to the skin, firmly rooted in Edward Hall’s “intimate space.” A hint of rosemary and clove flit just past the nose above smoky patchouli and labdanum.
“Pull me in, pull me closer … Blow my mind like explosions.”
That smokiness recalls the cigarettes and fog machines populating the dusky greenrooms and discotheques where one might find Yaeji spinning records, subwoofers shuddering like tectonic plate shifts. The sinuous shuffle of “Focus [Yaeji Remix]” works so well because at her core, Charli is a partier par excellence, who needs nothing except a solid DJ and loud speakers to have a good time with her friends. Is that the scent of green apple or apple Ciroc? Who cares, shut up and take this shot. “Just one touch leaves me helpless/On repeat like it’s endless.” The combination of rose and castoreum, at once floral and pungent, evokes the scent of a sweaty woman possessed by the beat. Lean in closer and you might catch a whiff of earthen cypriol oil.
Promise is an intense-at-first-sniff fragrance, loved for its resinous sweetness and hated for its noxious density. It is not a scent for the shy, nor those who will stumble through an apology when someone says their fragrance reeks. This perfume isn’t about smelling good—it’s about you.
The combination of rose and castoreum, at once floral and pungent, evokes the scent of a sweaty woman possessed by the beat.
“Sleep Sound” by Jamie xx // Jones Beach by Bond No. 9
You know the smell of methylbenzodioxepinone, even if you don’t know that you know it. The watery flesh of a watermelon rind or a particularly juicy cucumber; the scent of rain in the air, or a breeze off the sea. Calone seems to slacken the nervous system from the first whiff, as if the serenity of a large body of water can be distilled down to a single compound, formulated, bottled and sold to the people.
First synthesized in 1966, Calone was accidentally discovered by Pfizer scientists developing an affordable tranquilizer based on benzodiazepines; it’s almost too on the nose that a scent so calming shares a lineage with Valium. Calone was a fairly niche molecule in perfumery until the mid-1980s, when the initial patent expired. Davidoff’s Cool Water in 1988 and Aramis’s New West for Her in 1989 laid the groundwork for an explosion of aquatic fragrance in the 90s, led by Calvin Klein’s Escape in 1991. Market saturation would eventually nudge these fresh, ozonic perfumes out of the spotlight, although you’re never too far from Calone or one of its cousins, such as Azuron in Etat Libre d’Orange’s Sécrétions Magnifique or Transluzone in Margiela REPLICA’s Beach Walk.
I never lived alone until the first year of COVID. The newfound solitude enabled a number of deranged lifestyle choices, including a month where I listened to music constantly. As in, 24 hours a day off a speaker system set at a volume approaching house party decibels. I played so much Ravel my neighbors thought I was practicing piano.
And most nights I would fall asleep to Ravel, or Debussy, but I eventually settled on Girl/Sleep Sound by Jamie xx, cutting “Girl” after a few days in favor of the aptly titled B-side ad infinitum. If there is ketamine in heaven, I suspect seraphic harpists might pluck out the melody of “Sleep Sound” as they nod off. Like most Jamie xx compositions, the drums are expansive, room-filling, larger still for the lack of competing elements. There’s a hollowness at the center of “Sleep Sound,” a cavernous echo that serves primarily as a reminder of the listener’s own smallness. And unlike the majority of 2015’s In Colour, this track remains decidedly frosty, with a brisk, brusque quality that feels paradoxically cozy, like falling asleep with the windows open.
The violet and white musk base notes of Jones Beach by Bond No. 9 are enlivened by orange blossom and Calone; as the floral aspects dry down, Ambroxan becomes more prominent, warmly bubbling up beneath a nearly hermetic exterior. You can hear that metallic edge in “Sleep Sound,” how certain synthesizers squeak gratingly against the ear like cybernetic mice. The fragrance’s name comes from Robert Moses’s first major public work, a swamp terraformed and meticulously landscaped until it could support millions of summertime beachgoers; still, this perfume seems better suited to those who prefer to stay dry with a book than those who would dive in with abandon. It’s not a weak scent by any means—even layered over a dense fragrance, the Calone here would jump out—but like a Donald Judd sculpture, Jones Beach demands space of its own, room to breathe.
As heady as a dose of Calone can be, the base notes prevent this perfume from veering too far offshore. Taken together with clouds of white musk that roll in like fog, hazy Ambroxan conjures the semi-somnambulant fuzz of emptying the mind beneath a weighted blanket, knowing the somatic chaos of the body will soon be a blank slate for the restless dreams of tomorrow.
by Vivian Medithi
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