Norther Flicker, Welcome Winter, New Year, and Store Reopening

Earlier this month, the limited edition Northern Flicker was released. This perfume was many months in the making, and is an homage to both the Northern Flicker woodpecker and pine absolute. As the fragrance developed, many ideas also developed alongside the perfume, and so the two informed each other. I wrote a short essay that accompanies the bottle, which explains a bit of how I ended up where I did. Here is a portion from the beginning:

Northern Flicker presentation

“Northern Flicker began when I opened a bottle of Pine Absolute. Smelling this particularly beautiful material brings to mind the thousand small elements that make up a summer evening: fireflies alighting near hedges, the sun sinking slowly against the distant sky behind the trees, the increasing sound of cicadas, crickets, mocking birds, and gray treefrogs. Pine Absolute was at the center of stories that evolved in my mind. After some months of smelling this oil, plotting out different perfume sketches in my head, and making rough compositions, I started tracing a narrative of birds and pine trees, and the world where both lived together. I spent hours reading about woodpeckers. There are many birds in the Picidae family (the larger bird family that includes all woodpeckers.) They're found all over the world, nesting in desert cacti and drumming on trees in rainforests of Southeast Asia. Many of the woodpeckers that hunt and live in North and South America and the Caribbean will nest in dead or dying trees. It's fairly common to find woodpeckers pecking away in a hunt for grubs in pine trees that are nearing the end of their life cycle…”

---

Norther Flicker
Air Notes: Peppermint US, Spearmint US, Hedione, Bergamot

Bird Notes: White Musk Accord, Aged Dark Musk Accord, Fossilized Amber, Ginger Lily

Needles Notes: Ponderosa Pine US, Pine Absolute France, Clove, Poplar Bud Absolute, Antique Fir Leaf (~80 years old), Blackcurrant Leaf Accord

Tree Notes: Vetiver Java, Japanese Cypress (Hiba Wood), Cistus Labdanum (Rockrose), Tobacco Absolute, Oud Thailand

---

Norther Flicker is available online and also at Perfumology in Philadelphia, PA (USA). It is a 50ml EdP release with 300 bottles total, each bottle is $200 USD. Approximately 2/3 of the edition have sold, leaving a third remaining and for sale. Here at January Scent Project as of December 30th, all orders over $200 ship for free with the code FREESHIP at checkout.

---

Pages from The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

I was filming a podcast with my friends Nicola and Adam and we were talking about our feelings about seasons. I think Nicola was coming round to enjoying winter more, Adam was not. But I realized in our discussion just how much I love winter. I can tie it quite directly to one of my favorite children’s books, The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. This book made an enormous impression on me as a child, not only for its incredible illustrations, but also for the story. A young boy wakes up to find that overnight his neighborhood has become covered in snow. He then walks around everywhere discovering the adventures of the newly snow-covered place. Much of his day he spends by himself, and I think this solitude speaks to me on some special level - sometimes the most incredible experiences we have are those we stumble into on our own. Maybe it’s because then we don’t have to worry about sharing them with others (they can be completely our own?) I think winter is a lot like this; it presents many beautiful solitary moments in the cold when the world is stark and still but very alive. For this reason and many others I also feel very alive at this time of year.

New January Scent Project packaging

Soon, the new packaging will be available for all the perfumes in the January Scent Project line. This also includes the sample set, which will now hold 10 samples. It’s interesting to think that there are now 10 perfumes as part of JSP’s official offerings - something I hadn’t imagined when I started the adventure some years ago. As each perfume becomes available, I will make those available on the website, and as well to the retailers with whom I work. More updates will come as soon as possible, but I hope to have most of all the existing perfumes and Sorabji available in their new 50ml forms before the end of January, 2025.

---

Along with so many things that are happening at the close of 2024, I would like to thank so many in the JSP family who have remained faithful to the endeavor despite so much time when I’ve been working behind the scenes. Not dissimilar to the protagonist in The Snowy Day, much of this work is done in solitude (by necessity) and requires a ton of concentration and focus. Even just working out the labeling for the new boxes so that they’d conform to the new EU allergen requirements that’ll come into play in the next few years required weeks of careful work; the kind of stuff that puts everything on hold until you get it absolutely right. These steps, though tedious and at times mentally taxing, are very necessary for a perfume maker and the consumer.

At a plaza in Fireze, Itala, just before the holiday season, 2020

But soon we’ll be at the door of the old year and the threshold of the new, and I’d like to wish all of you a very Happy New Year. May the new page of the calendar represent a time of beneficial challenges, and may we find peace in the world even if there is significant chaos as well. May we all help each other.

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and "Sorabji" Fragrance

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was a British-Indian composer who wrote one of the longest piano pieces ever created, Opus clavicembalisticum. A performance of this work takes between four and four and a half hours, and was, for many decades, the longest written and performed piano work in existence. Sorabji went on to write even longer pieces, including 100 Transcendental Studies, an 8 1/2 hour work, often performed as separate units.

Sorabji was a deeply complex man who wrote equally complex music. His compositions demand tremendous effort from the performer and even, at times, from the audience. Encountering Opus clavicembalisticum, one is tossed into a world of chaotic melody; jumping, sweeping chords, fingers that plunge down deeply into the far bass piano keys followed by long fades into silence and then twinkling high notes like birds' wings flapping. During such a long piece with such dramatic variations between each movement, the range of emotion is astounding. What has struck me during the few times that I've listened to the entirety of Opus clavicembalisticum is the vast fluctuation between deep human pathos and an almost off-handed obfuscation of feeling, as though Sorabji was merely an artistic observer of things, making no comment or commitment. In this way, Opus clavicembalisticum carries with it the sensations, triumphs, and doldrums of a human day, viewed with coupled poignancy and exacting detail that only a quixotic artist such as himself could view it.

After learning more about Sorabji, and listening to more and more of his music, I felt compelled to create a fragrance that, in some way, captured even a fraction of the shadow left by his life of Earth. I do not know how much of the perfume is about music, or about an unusual man who rarely left his small village in England, or about the dedicated fan base of musicologists who dragged him out of very early retirement so that he might compose again before he passed away in 1988.

I relate on some level to Sorabji in the way that I relate to anyone who has a peculiar view of the world - a view that they refuse to relinquish and one that they will explore for much of their lives. That tenacity, that refusal to let go, is much like the dog who will hold on fiercely to the end of a toy during a game of tug-of-war. The world hadn't asked for a four and a half hour composition, but he created it because he had to. We are richer for it. And it inspired a perfume as well.

WAKING UP AFTER (SOMEWHAT OF A) SLUMBER

January Scent Project has, as many of you know, been on a hiatus over the first half of 2024. This has been necessary as we go through a rebranding effort. The exercise is a long and complex one, as happens with any company that’s been at it for more than a few years. Because this is still essentially a one-person venture, being able to run the business as it is (was) and modernize at the same time would have been too much, so a break was necessary.

To give you an idea of the various items that have been involved in this rebranding effort, here is a short list:

New bottle sizes (selection, ordering, shipping)

New packaging for new bottles (design, manufacture, printing, shipping)

New perfume development (yes, a new fragrance is coming out this year!)

New EU allergens listings requirements

New trademark and barcode registration

New logo, font, and visual designs

In short, it’s been a lot of work. It’s been fun, and exhausting and fascinating all at the same time. I’m grateful for many people who have been helpful along the way, who have offered advice, listened to ideas as they came up in conversation, looked at images, or listened to me complain as I (verbally) walked through the difficulties of making sense of this all.

There are still a few hurdles to overcome, although two big milestones have been reached: The new sample vials have been manufactured and are on their way on the ocean as we speak. Secondly, the new perfume is complete, and it will be available when the new sample kits are available as well. My proposed date for the brand to be up and running again is later in September of this year, news will be forthcoming as we approach that date.

Thank you all for the support as we come closer to when JSP is open to the public again. I deeply appreciate the faith that many have in this creative venture, and there will be much more to come in the following weeks. - John