Midjourney prompt & Photoshop edit by Nicoleta for Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration

“During a summer a few years ago, while walking on the Ramblas in Barcelona, I listened to a song by Rare Bird, an English band of progressive rock from the 70s. The song was called Sympathy, and the chorus was “and sympathy is what you need my friend, and sympathy is what you need my friend cause there’s not enough love to go ‘round, No, there’s not enough love to go ‘round…”. And there, suddenly, with the richness of a whole psychoanalytical past (according to Lacan), this same past which sometimes foists my strength on others or sometimes my great weakness on myself, there emerged from the refrain a word stronger than sympathy. It planted its black flag of melancholy in the heart of my mind, and issued forth a word more correct, more vast, more true, more sincere, more useful since forged in the experience of life: FRUSTRATION.  And then to sing again in my head the substituted refrain “…And frustration is what you need my friend, and frustration is what you need my friend.” -Founder and Creative Director of Etat Libre D’Orange Etienne de Swardt on the inspiration for Frustration

Approximately one year ago, my pupils dilated and nostrils fluttered in anticipation, reading the press release for Ghost in the Shell (which I reviewed here). It lit up so many parts of my brain: the “groupie” level of excitement as a long time Etat Libre D’Orange fan, the references to one of the best SF books of all time: Hyperion by Dan Simmons, and the neon cherry on the top – the name that teleported me straight to Shirow Masamune visual wizardry and the hypnotic rain montage from Ghost in the Shell.

MANE perfumer Mathilde Bijaoui

With Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration, composed by MANE perfumer Mathilde Bijaoui things were no different. It sent me directly to one of my favorite quotes, from one of the most transformative TV series – Twin Peaks – and inexorably set the tone of expectations. The connection? A frustrating one. Major Garland Briggs’ biggest fear also lurks, growls, and echoes in the muddy corners of my own mind. “The possibility that love is not enough”.

Anticipation is the prelude of love, isn’t it? As I waited, counting my postal taker, twice I day, for my Frustration parcel to arrive, I listened to a lot of Julle Cruise (whose death earlier this year didn’t hit me until now. But somehow, now it did. Like a ton of bricks).

Sherilynn Fenn as Audrey Horne Twin Peaks

Funny thing Etienne brought up Lacan* and the psychoanalytical past as this string of associations opened up drawers in my mind that I haven’t looked in for thirty years. I vividly remembered my childhood days, when pretending I was Audrey Horne, dancing eyes closed in a café, was my whole personality. I smiled thinking how in one episode, as a summer job, Audrey works at a perfume counter, and I thought then that working in anything perfume related is the most glamorous thing you can do. And let me tell you a secret: I still do and I still look at the wonderful ladies selling us perfumes in the elegant, thick carpeted stores with the same giddy childlike admiration of a kid (even if I’m sometimes twice their age). Sometimes times does feel circular, but when you get to where the line closes into a circle, frustration turns to possibility.

*In the Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis we are offered retroaction or Nachträglichkeit, deferred action: a system whereby future events control the meaning of ones in the past. So effects frequently determine their causes, rather than the other way around or, in other words, memory is reprinted in accordance with later experience.

Twin Peaks TV series still, Audrey Horne dancing

Autumn, being my favourite season, and October my most beloved month, I have countless rituals – big and small- to which I look forward all year. The first day of October, for me, is summed up in a short and simple gesture – my arms stretching inside the sleeves of my old, worn out, favourite brown leather jacket.

From the first moments on the skin, Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration smells red, warm and rusty. Intimate and lived in, just like the reassuring comforting feeling of your old jacket, an added shield of comfort, worn on top of the skin, deep rusty colours seeping into the soul, like honey slowly infusing a hot black cinnamon tea. The first signal of what’s inside – the iconic bottle- this time in a stunning blood red glass edition with the antiqued gold stamp on the corner. Weighty, tactile and catching the light of post-autumn-equinox sun is une obscur object du desir in itself.

My parents met in autumn, when college started, in a reddish October somewhere in the late hippie age, in a town where some variation of October fest was held. I grew up with “love genesis” stories hanging around at the border of my consciousness, like an inverted version of a villain origin story in a superhero movie. A particular story hovers in the air, like a warm rusty cloud, carried back to life by the scent – on how in the evenings, the air would get cold and they would buy roasted chestnuts from the street vendors and stuff them in their coat pockets, fresh out of the fire, to keep their hands warm. The stories about how they met embedded in me the idea that love must smell like waking through the cobbled streets of an old town with pointy roofs, there where the raindrops make a different kind of music dancing on the pavement and the lights of the streetlamp drew long yellow lines on the waters of Bega. Maybe there, one Saturday evening, the seed of the frustration was born and attracted possibility. The possibility that there’s IS enough love to go ‘round.

Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration by Nicoleta

The whipped cream chestnut puree made by mom, (a much less sophisticated eastern European variation of the more famous Montblanc dessert) filled the house with the smell of roasted chestnuts, vanilla, sugar and rum and signaled, pavlovian, that autumn began and all possibilities were open. I keep walking, in this imaginary olfactive world, where real and borrowed memories mix together, in another old town, where old houses had eyes and street vendors selling mulled wine, to be drunk from rough ceramic cups, hands deep in the warm pockets, footsteps crackling with dried out leaves. Warming up a glass of cognac on the balcony of the house that stood near the liar’s bridge, where the mountains in the horizon looked like impossible clouds, laughter and the sound of the old piano coming in from the old neighbours who still walked hand in hand. Love, a deeper kind of love and the sheer absence of it opened and closed new doors of possibility. Fast-forward to the “Castañada” traditions, encountered later in life in the north of Spain, and red threads of time stretching further, on the map, to a more northern sea and the communion of the darkest corners lit up by the bonfires of all souls night. And love transcending time, even if it is not – temporarily – enough, on the larger scale it is enough to grow the seed of possibility.  And maybe, in a multiverse theory of the soul the relativity of cause-and-effect merges into one endless circle. Frustrating yet fertile axiom of choice.

Returning to the more prosaic subject of cause-and-effect and reflections mirrored back and forth into art and olfaction. Would Frustration have so much meaning for me, if it were just from another brand, that I don’t fill up with meaning beforehand? Or vice versa, the authenticity and fire behind an idea creates a work of art that fuels those open to the same vibration, like radios catching a signal coming on their wavelength? As with olfaction, to what end is there an objective truth to a theory, how does vibration travel, are we constantly docking in uncharted lands, or just missing the keys that fit the right locks?  Puns very much intended.

Midjourney prompt & PhotoShop  by Nicoleta

Frustration prowls in similar hunting grounds as other deliciously complex beasts I love: think of the resinous nostalgia with vanilla and meringue from Christele Jacquemin Memory Lane, the Proustian silky sweetness of Masque Milano’s Madeleine, the smoky sexy darkness of L’Artisan’s Noir Exquis or the ambery deep comfort of MFK’s Grand Soir. Frustration will meet you somewhere in the middle, sweet and comforting, gripping you in a warm, enveloping hug. But not long after, you will hear an unsettling growl, lurking just beneath the surface, sharp claws digging in your back, swaying you into a darker & dirtier sensuous dance.

Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration is a delicious gourmand with a dark soul that still manages to keep a wide-eyed sense of possibility. For me, it summoned the image of a sexy chef, sleeves rolled up, cigarette in the corner of the mouth, opening roasted chestnuts with a sharp pocket knife. In the red kitchen of the Black Lodge. You pick the season.

It will always feel like autumn.

Top notes: Cumin; Cinnamon; Pure Rhum Jungle Essence; Middle notes: Pure Vanilla Jungle Essence, Vanilla Absolute, Ciste Absolute (Labdanum);Base notes: Chestnut Wood Accord, Bourbon Vetiver, Vinyl Gaiacol MANE Biotech

Nicoleta Tomsa, Senior Editor

Disclosure: kindly provided by Etat Libre D’Orange, opinions are my own

 

Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration, official image

Thanks to the generosity of Etat Libre D’Orange we have a 100 ml bottle for one registered reader in the USA, EU or UK. You must register or your entry will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what sparks your interest based on Nicoleta’s review and where you live. What is your favorite Etat Libre D’Orange fragrance? Draw closes 10/12/2022

Coming soon to the USA in October.

Etat Libre D’Orange Frustration is the fifth perfume in the brand’s Orange Extraordinaire collection: read our reviews of Exit the king, Five Hundred Years, Soul of my Soul and Experimentum Crucis

Etienne’s choice (as of 2017) of the three you should be wearing

Secretions Magnifique was inducted into our ÇaFleureBon Modern Masterpieces Hall of Fame in 2013

Mathilde Bijaoui is featured in our Young Perfumer’s Series

Also, check out Nicoleta’s reviews of Ghost in the Shell & Rien

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