Scents and Sensibility

Brian Eno's 1992 Details Magazine essay on his decades-long obsession with smell. He started in 1965, at art college, by collecting fifty small bottles of evocative aromas — rubber, naphtha, motorcycle dope, cuir de Russie, gasoline, ammonia, juniper. In 1978 he discovered an old London pharmacy crammed with oils and absolutes (styrax, patchouli, frangipani, amber, myrrh, geraniol, opoponax, heliotrope), then collected primary materials across Madrid, San Francisco's Chinatown, and Ibiza. He found that mixing two familiar smells could produce entirely new and unrecognisable sensations, and started looking — still unsatisfied — for a map of the olfactory world to compare to the colour wheel.