Anthony
“How you gonna find out your taste, if you don’t test it?”
He started writing rhymes at sixteen, on walls before paper. He came to perfume wanting to smell good and stayed for the notes that make people step back. Both, he says, are ways of carrying an emotion across a room.
Rhyme first, then the nose
A songwriter from West Borneo on animalic notes, his uncle’s boombox, and why he refuses to judge anything from inside his own coop.
The scribbles on the wall were the first evidence. Anthony grew up in Pontianak with more imagination than surfaces to put it on, and at sixteen he stepped into rap and started doing the thing he named himself: berRIMAjinasi. Perfume arrived later and by accident. He wanted to smell good, which is where almost everybody starts. Then somebody handed him something animalic, and the floor moved.
At the start my only aim was to smell good. But everything I thought about fragrance changed when I met om Ichan, who gave me the experience of sniffing animalic notes. It opened a new angle for me. It is not about the compliment. It is a work of art, or an emotion the perfumer wants to deliver through a scent.
And I feel music and fragrance are the two best ways to carry an emotion, or to remind you of a moment worth keeping.
Music and fragrance are the two best ways to carry an emotion.
The first thing you hear is not the music, it is the roof. Pontianak rain does not arrive, it lands. Everyone moves inside without discussing it, and the room fills up.
Earth after rain. That damp, cold impression always takes me back to sitting with my grandmother and my uncle. When the rain came down hard we would sit in the front room with snacks, and my uncle would always put on old songs through his beloved boombox. The cold kept coming in, but the talk and the joking gave us warmth.
Rain, as a fact of the address
Pontianak sits on the equator. There is a monument on the edge of town marking the line, and twice a year, at the equinoxes, things standing there stop casting a shadow at noon. The city grew up where the Landak meets the Kapuas, and the whole place is flat, tidal and wet.
Which matters, because it means the memory he described is not a special occasion. Rain there is not weather, it is furniture. It arrives most days and it arrives hard, and everybody has a set of behaviours ready for it: moving indoors without discussing it, the snacks appearing, the voice raised over the roof. Somebody who grows up under that does not have to be taught what damp smells like, or why an accord built out of wet ground and cold air would feel like company rather than gloom.
It also explains the second half of his taste. If you already know that cold and damp mean the room is about to fill up with people you like, then a fungal note is not an unpleasant surprise. It is a door opening.
I often wear Lone Wolf Sonata. When I have it on people might move away, but I really do enjoy the animalic notes in it. The Fungal Accord and the Cold Forest Accord give a damp, cold impression, as if they want to break through the limits of the noses around me.
And the next one is Karma Groove Fusion, my first love with ylang ylang and incense. That one gives me calm.
Nothing animalic at all. Clean, safe, and everyone will call it nice. All ten stay, and not one of them will remember it tomorrow.
The house flacon, standing at the front where the thing you actually reach for ends up. A shelf tells the truth about rotation whether or not its owner means it to.
Brewing something warm, putting on R&B, and a few sprays of a perfume with lavender notes, for the relaxed feeling.
He sent this before he sent anything else, which for a songwriter is the same as sending a photograph. Put it on and read the rest of the page over it.
In a song
The chord does not resolve, so the ear keeps waiting for something that is not coming. Longing is not a lyric, it is a delay.
In a bottle
You get the pleasant thing first, and then something warm underneath that will not let you put your wrist down. Same delay, different organ.
Good taste, for me, is not about the price, and not about what everyone is talking about. It is about how a scent gives every person a journey and an experience, so that we can value every creation and the story behind it more.
Smell the thing. Not the review, not the bottle, not the price. There is no way to find out what you like from a description written by somebody with a different nose and a different childhood.
I believe everyone has a point of view. Let us look wider, and never judge from the angle of the coop.
How you gonna find out your taste, if you don’t test it? Trust your nose, keep going, and don’t wash your time.
He wrote that last line himself and we are not touching it. A man who names his own verb for imagining in rhyme is allowed one more.
Photographs supplied by the subject