My Favorite Perfumes, 2023
Joshua Minsoo Kim pairs his top 10 perfumes of the year with 10 favorite albums
2023 marks the 8th year I’ve been into perfume as an artform. When I first started out, I would spend each day after work visiting department stores—Sephora, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus—and smelling as many fragrances as I could, asking for samples whenever possible. My education started there, alongside a sample pack from Twisted Lily and a purchase of Roja Dove’s massive book titled The Essence of Perfume. You’d think that after all this time I would find writing about scent easy, but I don’t think I’ve felt more incapable of translating thoughts and sensations into words than when writing about perfume. (It certainly feels harder than any album, film, or book review I’ve done.) Still, it’s this ineffability that keeps me coming back.
Last year, I wrote an article about my 10 favorite perfumes of 2022 for the Chicago Reader, my local alt-weekly. I was grateful for the opportunity, as it saw me writing about a practice I do all the time: pairing perfumes with albums. This is something I’ve consistently done for various reasons, most important of which is that it helps me better understand both the perfume I’m wearing and the album I’m hearing. Only the most foolish writer would believe that any album they’ve heard can be fully understood in a single, individual listen. Context changes everything. Think: How does a song you love change when you wear headphones vs speakers, on a walk vs when you’re dancing, when you’re happy vs depressed, in the winter vs the summer, in this moment vs 10 years from now? This practice of pairing albums with perfumes is just another way for me to get into the crevices of a work, to feel like I can get a better handle of what a piece of art is and what it’s doing to me. And, well, because it makes writing easier.
Below, you’ll find a ranked list of my 10 favorite perfumes of 2023. Each is paired with an album or EP that I loved from this year. You’ll notice that I have a specific taste. As a result, this is not a list that’s meant to be a “guide,” or to congratulate the best perfume in every category; it is simply a reflection of the fragrances that excited me most this year. Each entry is followed by a link to where the perfume can be purchased and where the album can be heard. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
10. Bortnikoff’s Le Voyage Oriental / Babyxsosa’s BLING BLING
I love the citrus that opens Le Voyage Oriental, which oscillates between bitter grapefruit and juicy orange, frequently dipping into the realm of chalky SweeTarts candy. It soon settles and a muted sweetness takes over—it’s got the creaminess of vanilla and the earthiness of nutmeg, but is largely offset by cloves. It remains in this zone for a while, with different whiffs varying in spice, and certain traces of woodiness and fruit poking through. It was Le Voyage Oriental and Marrakesh that moved me most from Bortnikoff this year, and both were subtly addictive because of how they weren’t eminently cozy until fully drying down.
The same could be said of BLING BLING, the best Babyxsosa release of 2023. The Virginia-based singer-rapper has a voice that’s AutoTuned to hell here, piercing like shrapnel in a way that’s drawn comparisons to Farrah Abraham’s modern-day-Shaggs classic My Teenage Dream Ended (2012). Everything here, though, is a lot more cognizant of its choices as being in good taste. “Wake Up” finds pitch-shifted vox that are as acerbic as its synths. When everything fades into moody piano melodies, Babyxsosa’s voice continues to warble and slur; she’s confident in the beauty of a raucous delivery. Elsewhere, she shouts across “LA Boy / City Girl,” her loud reverberations challenging the weight of a blistering hardcore beat. For a second, she offers a dulcet melody, but it too gets warped into textured rhythms. Much like Le Voyage, BLING BLING is a treat because it’s pretty in less obvious ways. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
More information about Le Voyage Oriental can be found at the Bortnikoff website. Samples are currently available at Luckyscent. Listen to Bling Bling on various streaming services.
9. Roberto Greco’s Rauque / Cero’s e o
Here’s another banger from perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, best known for being the nose behind numerous Serge Lutens perfumes, including Muscs Koublai Khan, Ambre Sultan, and Chergui. Violet and amber greet us in the opening, but it becomes a bit harder to pin down as it progresses. I get something of an animalic funk bubbling up, though something more suggestive than truly pungent, and then it’s mostly cresting waves of narcissus and ambergris and labdanum. I don’t get much in the way of leather, as the note list suggests, and Rauque stays fixed on this refined vanilla-like sweetness. My skin is often prone to drawing out vanilla but this feels less cloying than usual, and lands on something warmer, soothing. The perfume was meant to accompany Roberto Greco’s photography for an exhibition of the same name. His works look like objects were shot through a textured panel for fluorescent lights, the slight obfuscation giving it an AI-generated veneer. The perfume seems like a way of capturing a similar sort of almost-clarity.
The Japanese art-pop trio Cero writes circuitous songs, and their latest album e o is nothing if not a series of exercises in tension and release. On “Epigraph,” the vocal melodies rarely resolve, opting for a constant build-up: there are percussive taps, a cycling string arrangement, and harmonies that ebb and flow to make room for yet another lead vocal. Much of the record finds joy in this musical circumlocution, where songs feel purposefully overstuffed. There’s a joy that comes in hearing these winding detours because by the time the songs end, the journey it took to get there ends up feeling like the actual thrill; it’s real-deal in-the-moment music. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Samples of Rauque can be found at Luckyscent. Listen to e o at Bandcamp.
8. Areej Le Doré’s The History of Indonesian Oud / Dan Sour’s Drinkers Mass
One of the biggest surprises of the year came with Areej Le Doré’s The History of Indonesian Oud, the cheapest and most accessible offering in Russian Adam’s The History of Oud collection. The oud-obsessed will find much to complain about: there’s not enough funk, it smells too clean, and the dry down is a bit too linear. Personally, I can’t get enough of how this single-origin oud smells—a contemplative tapestry of damp woods and anise, cinnamon and clove. The online wars that have been waged regarding “authentic” and “clean” ouds are the same as you’d find in any sort of music forum with genre purists, and this new-gen (and apparently sustainable) approach to agarwood keeps me interested in much the same way: What facets are highlighted that I hadn’t paid attention to before, that the traditional folks don’t care for? The process here, which involved both carbon dioxide and ethanol extraction, results in something analogous to burning oud chips. It’s a simpler pleasure, resinous and sweet and among the best spicy frags of 2023.
I kept coming back to Dan Sour’s Drinkers Mass this year for similar reasons. Dan Gilmore (the very first person I interviewed for Tone Glow) and Barn Sour (a duo I had perform an online concert during the lockdown days) are artists I’ve admired for years, and their collaboration feels like a culmination of the poetic collage work you’d find in the post-Lambkin, post-Sean McCann realm. Its songs offer a down-home musique concrète: every acousmatic whirr and garbled sample is treated as a distinct elemental force, no different than a note played on a traditional instrument. They arrive and disappear in loping fashion, creating beautiful musical phrases that congeal into a dainty muck. It’s lovingly crafted and unconcerned with carrying the hallmarks of its historical roots. It’s porch music, really. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase History of Indonesian Oud at the Areej Le Dore website. Samples are currently available at Sealed Essence. Listen to Dan Sour’s Drinkers Mass at Bandcamp.
7. Clandestine Laboratories’ Wendover / Éric La Casa + Seijiro Murayama’s Supersédure 2
Clandestine Laboratories released four fragrances this year: Côte, Astoria, Sea Otter, and Wendover. The last of these was handily my favorite, showcasing perfumer Mark Sage’s deft handling of synthetics to craft illustrative, multidimensional fragrances. It opens with a bang: a cloud of peat and charcoal, immense in the way that any fragrance with these notes are. It doesn’t aim for crass campfire nostalgia, and instead uses all this smoke to channel something meditative—aided in part by the florals and greens hiding underneath. Over time, the smokiness fades to suggest little more than warm embers, and it all rests on a creamy, occasionally powdery sweetness. It’s the way these two poles interact—the brash and the intimate—that allows the perfume to transcend a mere imagining of a past era. It’s more phenomenological, like experiencing the formation of a memory; time plays a role because it provides distance from the original event (the smoke!), but also for how it situates the moment in a larger context (the sweetness that ultimately emerges from—and defines—the smoke’s beauty).
Éric La Casa + Seijiro Murayama’s Supersédure 2 stands out among the many wonderful field recording albums this year because of its interrogation of our perception of sound. The two artists stitch together recordings from across 20 years and regularly toy with distance. This may be literal—as in the amount of space between a recording device and the actual sound created—or in terms of a particular noise and our ability to identify it. The result is something exceedingly participatory, where we’re attuned to individual pieces becoming foregrounded and backgrounded, of sounds moving from close-miked to reverberatingly distant, of the impact that room tone has on the overarching atmosphere, of a consideration for when something enters the realm of the acousmatic. Sonically, it has a palette that recalls Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman’s Three Exercises, but this is a less inquisitive affair: there’s no puzzle I feel compelled to solve, which means I’m left to revel in the peculiarity of sound itself. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Purchase Wendover at the Clandestine Laboratories website. Samples are available on the same site. Listen to Tëdd ak Mame Coumba Lamba ak Mame Coumba Mbang at Bandcamp.
6. Prin’s Nilmalee / DJ Arana’s Rock Pesado 2
My favorite fragrance from Prin Lomros this year was more of what the perfumer does best: heady animalic fragrances. I wouldn’t classify Nilmalee as particularly challenging, however, as it’s surrounded by enough spices (caraway, cumin) and florals (lotus, gardenin) to keep this from turning into anything truly skanky. I’m enamored with its softness, mostly, and how it has this way of adding a prickliness to the creaminess on display. It’s not dry or somber, either, despite the initial blast feeling like it may go down that route.
This tenderness is akin to what I feel is at the heart of DJ Arana’s Rock Pesado 2. This year marked a continued rise in popularity of baile funk, and this record was one I found consistently exciting for the way it excavated beauty. There’s a seemingly dark nature to how these beats and vocals all echo in massive, cavernous spaces, but the samples occasionally border on the spiritual, and the different recording fidelities point to a sort of bridging across time periods and locales—like the strangeness of hearing random bits of sound interrupting FM radio. It all comes together in trance-inducing rhythms and séance-like atmospheres. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
More information about Nilmalee can be found at the Prin website. Samples are available at Luckyscent. Listen to Rock Pesado 2 on various streaming services.
5. Agar Aura’s Bushi No Kaori / Goat’s Joy in Fear
This one’s a total no-brainer for me: a moody blend of ouds that’s rounded out by cedar, hinoki, and spices. Agar Aura blew me away last year with Malinau, and Bushi No Kaori is more of what I love. I get the slightest hint of smokiness, but it’s otherwise a direct oud-and-spice affair. The occasional whiff brings a sharp sourness, with others bringing me towards the menthol side of things, but it’s all incredibly smooth in presentation. It’s akin to what I love about Goat’s newest album Joy in Fear. The Japanese band’s meticulous, austere brand of rock music—even more ascetic in presentation than the acts Kyle Gann labeled “totalism”—is on full display on a track like “III I IIII III.” The beat is so mechanical that every kick and hi-hat strike feels like it’s asking you to pay attention to the variations that are bound to come. And when they do—most notably in the form of a buzzing guitar tone—its presence doesn’t feel alarming because we’ve been primed for anything coming our way. It’s similar to getting a bit of that oud funk in Bushi No Kaori—it goes down perfect, and feels at one with the rest of the notes because the whole fragrance forces you to remain focused and introspective. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
Find more information about Bushi No Kaori at the Agar Aura website. Samples are available at Luckyscent and Sealed Essence. Joy in Fear is available at Boomkat.
4. Angelos Créations Olfactives’ Danse Lascive / Taichu’s RAWR
I loved Danse Lascive from the get-go: a huge leather rose fragrance that lets you take in both facets in equal, full-bodied measure. I don’t get much smoke or tobacco; maybe the leather’s a bit dusty, but this is all extravagance and excess. The rose oils bring both the petals and the stem, and its richness is never at odds with the leather, which is less dominatrix-kinky than confidently sensual. You can chalk that up to the lack of animalic notes, and the smallest hints of something amberish—a likely result of the olibanum—granting everything a more lavish atmosphere.
I sense that same poise throughout Taichu’s music. She’s been one of the most thrilling Argentinian pop stars of the past few years, nimbly maneuvering between hyperpop and RKT songs with magnetic aplomb. Her debut album RAWR finds her streamlining much of her ideas into bracing runway-ready pop songs. She whispers and raps and croons with an alluring nonchalance, the blistering synths and booming beats all just different fun-house mirrors to reflect light back at her. There’s rap braggadocio and swaggering reggaeton, EDM anthems and Jersey club-isms. No matter the style, every song just reveals another side of her effortless cool. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
More information about Danse Lascive can be found at the Angelos Créations Olfactives website. Samples are available at Luckyscent. Listen to RAWR on various streaming services.
3. Al Shareef’s Elevation / Chuquimamani-Condori’s DJ E
Al Shareef’s Elevation is one of the most absurdly kaleidoscopic ouds I’ve ever smelled, due in no small part to the fact that it was created with 30 different oud oils. I was floored by the opening, which felt like I was witnessing something evolve right before me. The perfume felt active—alive—and each whiff carried with it a boisterous dance between the sweet and spicy, the woody and animalic. Things get more tame after this riotous introduction, but no less evocative in its shapeshifting. This is, to be sure, not a cheesy or funky oud, and so the pleasure comes from noticing its subtle transformations. Consider the first blast an inescapable pedagogical moment, and the rest of Elevation a chance to be more attentive to the work being done at subtler levels.
Chuquimamani-Condori (aka Elysia Crampton) dropped my favorite album of the year with DJ E, a refinement of the melodic, sample-heavy collage work that first proved stunning on E+E’s The Light That You Gave Me to See You (2013). It’s impossible to think about this album without also considering the installation they did with their brother Joshua for MoMA PS1. That work involved two different layers of listening: you wear headphones to hear stories from their ancestors, and then speakers throughout the two-story space would play music too. The latter provided a backdrop (or “shell”) to understand the former. It was a jaw-dropping experience, as it delivered a layered mode of listening that considered oral storytelling as a way to imagine Indigenous futures. I get the same hopeful feeling with DJ E, where a smattering of samples and traditional musics collide to conjure up a space irrefutably singular: it’s simultaneously an ode to personal histories, a safe haven for the present, and an ambitious call for what the future can be. Everything gets interwoven, and time collapses. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
More information about Elevation can be found at the Al Shareef website. Samples are available at Sealed Essence. Listen to DJ E at Bandcamp.
2. Mallo’s Oto & BD / Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood’s Tête-à-tête
Mallo was my favorite perfume house of the year. All four of their bottles had something to offer—Wam has the most alarming fecal opening I’ve smelled in ages, Arc is a lovely fougère, and Oto and BD are true bottle-worthy stunners. Oto opens with a spritz of citrus, but quickly becomes a lush cloud of fantasy woods, though associations with anything in the Comme des Garçons realm dissipates as this clearly settles into something more natural. It’s rounded out by hyrax and Laotian oud, both of which provide enough bite for this to not become too neat a fragrance. BD, on the other hand, is more classical, and is jasmine forward—it’s rich and sweet and tempered by civet and castoreum to give it a more regal decorum. These are straight-ahead, unassailable fragrances that do exactly what you’d expect from the note breakdowns. I couldn’t get enough.
I’ve written about Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood’s Tête-à-tête at length already, but something I kept thinking about with this album is how much of a testament it is to lifelong love. It was obvious that the two had this when I interviewed Lockwood, and from the stories she’s shared elsewhere, but to hear it all on a musical recording is eye-opening. The two didn’t really record much together at all, and one of the only pieces that exists is “Conversations.” It stitches together phone calls the two had during the initial honeymoon phase of their relationship. After Anderson’s passing, Lockwood constructed “For Ruth,” which revisits that idea by adorning field recordings with snippets of their laughter and speech. Lockwood’s approach to “sound maps” has always involved a consideration for the way people and nature are intertwined; with Tête-à-tête, she makes evident that we’re all just constellations of the people we’re blessed to know. The three tracks form something of a dialectic: the longform, meditative drone of “Resolutions” leads to the intensely personal and unadorned “Conversations,” and then “For Ruth” finds a middle ground. Nothing is too much of a surprise given the artists’ previous works, but it’s impossible to hear these from an entirely intellectual vantage: you get reduced to an emotional mush, in awe of the thoughtfulness and care they showed each other and in their artistry. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
More information about Oto and BD can be found at the Mallo website. Samples are available at Luckyscent. Listen to Tête-à-tête at Bandcamp.
1. Dusita’s Rosarine / Tyla’s Tyla
I wore Dusita’s Rosarine more than any other fragrance this year, constantly enamored with how it embodied what I always wanted from a summer rose. It is by far my favorite perfume from Pissara Umavijani since Oudh Infini, my choice for the best fragrance of the 2010s. Here, a rose emerges alongside raspberry and lychee, the sweetness coming off sparkly and bright without teetering into treacle. It was refreshing in the summer heat, and I experienced it in two wildly different live music settings. Once was during a 9am set from Underground Resistance, feeling nothing short of glamorous as Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” came on (“I wanna be your brother / I wanna be your mother and your sister, too” never felt so real.) And then once again while moshing at Soul Glo’s Pitchfork Fest set, all the sweat and mud draped around me like sequins glimmering in the sunlight. If Oudh Infini was all night-time skank and negligees, then Rosarine transforms that irresistible sensuality into day-time richness. It was my favorite piece of art all year, in any medium.
Of the many musicians that defined my summer, the only artist who matched Rosarine’s clarity of vision and sumptuous sexuality was South African singer Tyla. “Water” was the best song she released yet, building on ideas she’d previously explored in bridging amapiano with Western R&B sensibilities. The log drums swivel more than the typical amapiano track, and the flagellating synths arrive sparingly and tastefully, as if to embody gyrating hips. For all the talk of younger generations being sexless, the chorus felt necessary: a group chant extolling the desire to feel desire. Songs rarely make come-ons feel so celebratory. More recently, Tyla’s new self-titled EP was released ahead of her 2024 debut album, and it features more explorations of her stylistic crossover. “Truth or Dare” is firmly Afrobeats, and has vocal harmonies that are indebted to the gospel-tinged ones that Asake’s employed. “Butterflies” is a daydreaming ballad that’s sweet and diaphanous. And best of all is “On and On,” a song that brings those amapiano bass synths to new territories. Producers in South Africa have turned them into elastic putty and lo-fi trembles, but they’ve never made it sound as sensual as this. The beat trembles like it’s causing seismic waves, and to have them in a song this soft makes them register as the unmistakable puttering of a heart, of the sonic equivalent of surrendering to passion. Listen on speakers, loudly, and let it hit your core—you won’t be the same. —Joshua Minsoo Kim
More information about Rosarine can be found at the Dusita website. Samples are currently available at ZGO Perfumery and Indigo Perfumery. Listen to Tyla on various streaming services.
Thank you for reading this special issue of Tone Glow. Smell ya later.
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These are such sublime perfume/music pairings—really loved reading your incredibly evocative descriptions of the scents and the sounds! Loved the Al Shareef’s Elevation / Chuquimamani-Condori’s DJ E one especially
I would love to experience this as a happening. I feel like I learned so much about things I'd never heard a word about before.