Cross-pollination of the arts: Scent and sound
On the top floor of a terrace house that has been transformed into the HQ and associated studios of the Onedayers, singer-songwriter and overall music sensation Miguel played me his new, as yet unreleased, solo studio album. It is a raw, rock-heavy, kind of house-y outpouring of his life over the past couple of years, with thumping bass tracks and electric guitar riffs that zoom around the brain. Some songs are yearning, others despairing, and of course there are a handful that showcase his well-known babymaking sex appeal. There was one that made me say ‘everyone is going to twerk to this!’
I myself was at the studio to listen to a series of songs on genuine state-of-the-art sound equipment. These are created by Gray Wyot, a mixmaster based in Saigon, Vietnam, whom I met in 2024. He and his crew signed themselves up to do a project with me when I was there for the Olfactory Odyssey exhibition with Metascent - I did an exploratory session with Gray and then met up with the rest of them once we realised that we were on to something. I’ll be creating scents for 12 songs - 6 classical and 6 lofi - as a perfumed album. Potentially, the first of its kind….?
We are hoping to release it this year, 2025.
Sitting in Gray’s home studio in a soundproof room, matching scents to melodies and beats and chords etc, was one of those moments that I felt that kind of transcendental euphoria that only comes when you know you are in the exact right place at the exact right time doing exactly what you want to do (other times I have felt this I was on a boat at sunrise, off to go diving). I have created many many scents to link to colours and shapes and forms but it was my first time expressing sound through scent. Dopamine surged and I was hooked. Gray spoke with the crew and we agreed to embark on a difficult, tricky, but unprecedented and creatively adventurous project.
The songs themselves are utterly beautiful, and I am determined to do them justice with the scents. I don’t know yet what form they’ll take (ambient, wearable, whatever), but I know that I will need to get them exactly precise in order to match the beauty of the music. Note: I named half of them, which was an honour.
As for the new album perfume, I went home and kept the frequencies and vibrations of that musical story inside my head. Miguel wasn’t able to come to my studio personally so when I sat down to create the perfume I tried to bring the bizarre changes across into a translation that was strange and beautiful without being pretty. I tried to capture the darkness without making it a gimmicky “masculine” fragrance, and also tried to include scents that he had singled out when we’d gone through my scent kit in the studio. When I presented the fragrance to him before he left Sydney, I said, ‘Don’t forget to pretend to like it. If you can’t pretend, then just ghost me entirely’ lol. Can you imagine if he hated it? I would die of embarrassment, probably.
Honestly, I am desperately infatuated with the intersection of scent and sound. It’s all I want to do, it’s all I want to make. Delightedly, I am friends with Charlie J Perry, a songwriter and perfumer (not combined, at this stage) based in London (keep an eye out for his brand to launch: Sonnet London). We have long perfume chats and swap ingredients from across the globe. He wrote a very beloved song by the musical phenomenon BTS entitled Singularity, which I have loved deeply for years. I asked him what that song would smell like, if he had to compose a fragrance of it.
‘I dunno, roses?’
SIR. PLEASE. In order to correct this dreadful cliche, I have composed a Singularity fragrance and will send it to him soon. I think I put a tiny bit of rose geranium in, to honour the originator’s personal choice ;)
I want to make perfume mixtapes and offer them on my website, I want to sit in music studios and make scented songs and albums, I want to fill music venues with my compositions. It’s my Roman Empire, if you will. Charlie has asked me to make a steam diffuser oil to go with his latest album, so I am happy with that for now.
Stay tuned - I might just have a musical career trajectory up my sleeve…
