Radio Bombay

"Radio Bombay is a very modern radiant sandalwood fragrance. As a guitar player, I know what the back of an amplifier smells like when it heats up, so I thought, what if there was an amplifier, a stereo, a radio, made of sandalwood—then the hot copper tube would heat up, and you would get puffs of what real fine sandalwood oil smells like. Peach, musk, milk, iris, coconut, and cedar. All together it gives a big throw of the traditional Mysore sandalwood. For a wood, it's medium bodied. It's not so heavy, it's very light and sophisticated."

I am interested in hypothetical scent. Not everything has a strong or readily perceivable aroma, but objects can suggest a fragrance. Light bulbs glow. Electricity courses through their metal filaments. They melt the dust on their surface emitting wisps of heat. The tubes in amplifiers have a certain aroma. When my ‘69 Fender Deluxe gets heated-up (after rip-roaring monster shredding), the back of the amp produces a hot dusty metallic grease perfume—the scent of backstage in a humid venue.

So what if there was a tube amplifier in an old radio made of sandalwood? Then the interaction of the heat would open up the pores of the wood, singing its smooth elegant fragrance - puffs of musky cedar, peach, coconut, lactones, milk.

Real sandalwood essence is perfection. I often wear it neat. It smells of India, effigies, purity, focus. Unfortunately, it has been overharvested, so perfumers don’t use the oil from Mysore anymore.

Radio Bombay is a deconstruction of the Mysore santal rebuilt from all the aspects written above. I imagine the radio sitting in a small hot shop in Bandra —the “Brooklyn” of Bombay (sorry). The heat deconstructs the oils in the wood. Ragas and Geeta Dutt tunes jangle out of its tiny speaker in the busy city.