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!

Picked up a bottle in Europe. I'm not sure how they've kept this from reaching the US grey market yet; I found two stores with it in stock in Prague. Back home now. I personally find this much closer to TF Black Lacquer than CDG Black but my friend disagrees re: TFBL. Whatever she owns neither. Regardless, this is in the same realm: pitch black but positive and even comforting. Maybe I can describe as a warm dark attic, working with 8-track recorder or celluloid projector generating machine heat, dust in the air floating through scattering beams of light, incense burning. This has made my bottle of CdG Black obsolete. More concentrated, more interesting, longer lasting.

Superb composition. Shades of Black by CDG, a pinch of Lonestar Memories by Tauer and a shake of L’Orpheline by Serge Lutens. This is dark, spicy, mysterious and very unisex. Picked it up at Max’s SLEEP concert in London but hope it becomes more widely available as it’s a fantastic piece of work.

Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. It really smells like an old, expensive-looking orchestra hall. That "old" smell can sometimes give a slight negative feeling of a stuffy, mouldy room. But I rarely feel like it's a problem. Something about this scent makes me feel like I know what I'm doing.

Max Richter's Sleep album got me through the Covid lockdown, and "On the Nature of Daylight" (used in Arrival) and his score for The Leftovers pull at my heartstrings and tickle my brain. This is a good fragrance that connotes the listed notes. Respect. That said, there's an "I've been here before" chemically vibe to many CdG fragrances -- and more for style than any specific note, this ends up smelling a lot like CdG Black, as many have pointed out. It holds onto the violin resin smell much longer than D&D's Bowmakers. But it's not the Ur- ink and resin scent I had hoped for. It's very nice but not a strong statement. A safe choice, and an interesting one, but I don't see myself buying it once my sample is used up. I think all CdG skews a bit younger, and for someone in their 20s-40s, this might be an om nom choice.

As many other reviewers have noted, this is all well-trod ground, and that really is my main complaint against the fragrance. Otherwise, I happen to love the incense and graphite notes themselves in general, and as this is a perfectly competent display of them I'm actively considering buying a bottle. Being a Max Richter mega-fan dating back to before he hit the mainstream (I'm so sorry for saying that), its still a pinch-me situation to see his name on a designer fragrance.

Really like it but I have TF Black Lacquer so it feels redundant to get this.

This fragrance is very, very similar to Forest Lungs by The Nue Co., but it’s stronger and lasts much longer. I will have that after my bottle of forest lungs is finished

This is a big nope for me. It opens with a peppery incense accord, but quickly takes an unsettling synthetic turn. Oddly enough, it reminds me of standing near the public restrooms in the lobby of the Catholic church I attended as a kid—those times when I arrived late and had to listen to the service from outside so as not to disturb it. Unfortunately, that’s the association I can’t shake. It’s just too reminiscent of public spaces in an unflattering way to me.

Smells amazing at first, still very CdG woody with the lacquer twist and some nepalese incensy influence. BUT the dry down on me (and my merino sweaters) is so stale and a carbon copy of Santal Blue and Wonderoud. I am curious as to why they all dry down to the exact same scent, doesn't happen for any of my other CdG (non woody) fragrances.

Opens with a really fresh bite of black pepper and a very subtle kind of spicy-floral leather aroma. That settles down quickly and it comes together as a piece of freshly cut wood with a mildly tangy backbone of resins. It feels almost clinical and sterile, with a transparent, singular woody accord taking center stage. I get the sense of an artist's studio before someone has moved in- blank white walls, cold floors, wooden rafters. It feels like a liminal space. I also get the sense of graphite, or at least the pencil wood that contains it. There's an element of laquer like someone else mentioned- a kind of chemical freshness but it's possibly just from the overlap of odd ingredient pairings coming together. The fruity, dirty edges of ylang-ylang, the funky warmth of cumin. They add a nice depth to the sawdust sensation without coloring it too heavily. Hours later I kept getting this mildly sweet and spicy aroma that I was surprised was still coming off the test strip. It feels like you've walked into a storage shed full of old wooden furniture- or more aptly like the scent of antique wooden instruments in pristine condition. That's where it feels a bit odd to me- not quite inviting but very evocative and abstract. I think I'd be upset at anything less though, as this feels like a good return to form for CDG as I wasn't in love with Odeur 10 and while I did appreciate Zero it was something that still felt like it was following the minimal woody amber trend. This feels restrained, focused, and still fairly unique even if the main aroma falls into a firey, peppered wood that things like Black have explored before. I think this feels more modern without any of the ambered accents from that release. Alternatively, it might be closer to Scorpio Rising by Eris Parfums, which shares a lot with Antoine Lee's other spiced wood perfumes which have found their way into CDG's lineup.

as a big fan of his music and a fan of incense (although not listed in the notes) this is an a+ fragrance from me. official notes are: “Graphite, Vetiver, Piano Soundboard Cedar, Violin Bow Rosin, Transistor, and Magnetic Tape”. slightly dusty, cold abandoned church smell and very beautiful!

This starts like cdg black but dries down and becomes really resinous. Smells like something amouage would put out. Excellent quality and last days on clothes

I sampled it in Berlin in the CdG store. It is basically the same as Black. Alas, unremarkable for me.

This is 90% cdg Black but without the licorice, in case you don't like it in Black.