Max Richter 01

It begins in the quiet of a guest bedroom you have always been ashamed of, a room no one ever uses. The air smells faintly of dust and old wood. You just quit your job in Human Resources and tell your spouse you want to pursue music. They panic. "But honey we have two kids to feed, you can't just quit!" they say. You kiss them on the cheek and tell them, "Trust me, this is going to work." You know this is the path you were meant to take. You turn that forgotten room into a studio. You fill it with a turntable and vinyls, studio monitors, headphones, microphones, a keyboard, instruments, cables, the works. The faint scent of warm electronics and polished wood mixes with the mustiness of the room. You are ready and full of excitement, but the first months are brutal. You sit at the keyboard in the middle of the night while your family sleeps, pencil in hand, trying to capture even a single melody. Nothing sounds right. You scribble over your notes in frustration and bury your face in your hands. You feel like you have failed yourself, your family, and your friends. After three months of struggling, you find yourself on the way to re-apply for your old job. Your steps feel heavy and your mind is full of doubt. As you walk, you hear a violinist playing. They are a retired musician performing on the street and the music stops you in your tracks. The notes float through the cold air and shimmer like sunlight on water. It is the most beautiful thing you have ever heard. You have nothing to lose so you invite them into your studio even though you have almost nothing to show as you have scribbled most of it out, and after convincing your spouse, they stay with you. You show them what you have been working on. "Hmmm," they say, "aha, just as you were missing these notes C sharp, F, and A flat!" You start to play together and suddenly the music you have been chasing falls into place. You create melodies that feel effortless and alive, music you could never have written alone. The room fills with the warmth of shared sound, the faint scent of chalk from your scribbled papers mixing with the polished wood of the piano. Days turn into nights as you play. Your music grows more confident, more daring, more alive with every session. After a year of pouring yourself into it, your first album is ready. Slowly at first it finds its audience and then begins to gain traction. Before you know it, you are performing at places like Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Albert Hall in London. You finally have enough money to upgrade your apartment and even enough to get your violin partner their own place. When it is time to pack up the studio to move, you find the scribbled papers you abandoned months before. The graphite still clings to them and a soft, familiar scent rises as you touch them, a mixture of pencil dust and late-night frustration. You tuck them away and bring them to your new home where they now sit framed, a quiet testament to the risks taken and the persistence that carried you through. Now you stand in the middle of your new studio holding the vinyl of your first album. The cover is warm in your hands, the soft smell of fresh ink on the liner notes blends with the subtle musk of the room, and beneath it all, the faint scent of graphite rises, a memory of nights spent chasing a melody. Each note holds the struggle, the late hours, and the moments of sudden clarity that made it all worthwhile. It is a story of trust, connection, and courage, of creating something that could not exist without daring to begin. Listening to it feels like stepping onto solid ground after standing at the edge of a leap. It is proof that even fragile dreams can become enduring beauty and the music we make becomes truly beautiful when we follow it all the way.

In the early 2000s, Banana Republic made a candle and home-scent spray called Winter that was only available around Christmastime. I think it was 2 or 3 seasons in a row, but I can't recall. It was the ultimate comfort scent: snow, warm woods, Douglas fir sap, mulling spices, incense, musk... I was OBSESSED with this fragrance. To the point where I occasionally would spray a tiny amount of the home spray on myself because there was no cologne version. It burned, but I didn't care because I smelled like NYC Christmas magic. They discontinued it and I've spent the last 20-something years searching for a perfume or cologne that was a dupe of this scent. Many have come close at first spritz but failed miserably afterward. But now my search is over. This is 95% identical, in a format that won't cause chemical burns. It's glorious. The other 5% are the metallic/avant-garde notes one expects from CDG, which I love and always work well with my chemistry, so I don't begrudge them at all, and they don't take away from the extreme bliss that the composition evokes. For what it's worth, there's a ghost of Avignon in the mix here, which floats in around the 2-hour mark. Another plus, IMO, Avignon being CDG's best incense frag. I'm surprised no one else has mentioned seeing it.

Max Richter 01 is a masterclass in balance, not least of all taking the warm spice of CdG’s Black and Blackpepper, and offsetting it beautifully with the inorganic powder of 53 and 71. Where Théâtre du Châtelet situates you directly in a place out of time, and Copper has always struck me as a narrative account of an event told backwards, Max Richter 01’s olfactory approximation of modern classical composition and recording provides the wearer with a series of images, gracefully fading in and out, in extreme close-up. I have no idea how Max Richter himself would take this, but I am reminded of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV, whose every piece was accompanied by its own image – sometimes of stark nature; other times of the technology and wooden construction of the studio itself. Individual and interconnected, the fragrance invokes the hyper-specific list of notes on one side of the bottle, and evokes the mystery of the as-yet blank score lines on the other.

CdG Black is much smokier, stickier, and sweeter to my nose-- really not getting the comparisons here. Was there a press release or something that mentioned Black for some reason so everyone just clung to that and piled on? Or is it simply because it's made by the same perfumer so people have that association going in? Anyway, Max Richter is lovely. I get two contrasting components to this: on one hand, something sharp, aldehydic, almost soapy, on the other, something warm, aromatic, spicy, resinous. The sharpness is tempered nicely by the woody warmth of cumin and patchouli. Love the cedar in this-- like an old chest stuffed with dried herbs & spices. It's an interesting contrast between the two sides, and luckily for me the resinous warmth wins out in the dry down. A mineralic tang from graphite lurks in the background, but I mostly get warm, spicy woods. I wish they sold this in a smaller bottle (100 ml is crazy to me, I can barely finish 10 mls).

This truly is a symphony in a bottle. Incredibly complex that somehow manages to end up as a unified orchestra. On my skin it’s incredibly long lasting, sometimes even to the day after. It has a very warm and ethereal sense to it, and a powderyness that itches my brain in just the right way. It also has this sort of woody rubbery smell you get from Palo Santo, even though it’s not listed as a note. Just having listened to a couple of Richter’s compositions this makes total sense. It’s very much unisex in a way that’s beyond gender. I absolutely get the likeness to Black, however this one feels more wood focused and generally more well blended. It also lasts way better on the skin. The feeling this evokes in me is the calm after the storm. Simply incredible!