@Simla House
i love to read your honest impressions of hindustan 1. i know it was one wear and a tiny one, but do pls share your thoughts with all of us.
i studied it again last night and once again while it is a very different oil to any and all hindi (minus chugoko if you are ok with calling it hindi) and some may call it avant garde and extra terrestial oil, i find it utterly fascinating and objectively speaking of very high quality and true hindi. the coumarin, the hay, the countryside but more alpine country side (swiss farm?) is what i see.
sure there is the signature pristine top note of taha here, but there is depth too. like royal malinau. tons of depth in fact. it is not as radical and obvious of a progression as lets say ORSL or kinam rouge or many of ensar's oils, but there is still progression nonetheless which in my eyes suggests the fractionation practice is not holding true here.
I should have really started taking notes after that first swipe, even though I exclaimed “I should do this right away”, but then out came the Sutera Sumba, the Kuzen, the Nha Trang, the Kyara Ltd 2.0, the Port Moresby, the ASO woods, the woods from Zakir bhai, the new sticks from Kyara Zen….etc etc etc. By the end of the session I was not only fully fumigated by all of the above, but also blasted the fuming Volcano on the way out the door.
As I said the other night, if we saw Chugoko Senkoh as a multi-tiered jello cake, picture someone skimming off the top layer, isolating it, ageing it on it’s own without the influence of the base notes that one can find in CS: there you’d have my first opinion of H1. At this point I’ll re-state the caveat that Taha had to mentioned to you, for other readers: This oil is not yet ready to be presented in the way it is intended to be, and needs another month or so. I commend you for wanting taste of H1 in it’s infancy, to study the progression. With that in mind, we’ll no doubt see the EQ tweaked on this one.
As far as H1 being an “al-Hind” style oil, my younger self would have said no way. My experience with oud stems from collecting the classic Assamese profile while living in the Sub Continent, but since I’ve come to this artisanal style of cookery, I’ve been dazzled again and again by what is possible, and have been floored by the presentation of some absolutely first class hindis.
For purists who only like their al-Hind done a certain way, then H1 might be a challenging piece of art. Is Hindustan 1 a hindi oil?? I have no idea. These days I’m not sure what is what. Ensar and Taha have turned the source wood into liquid architecture, maybe liquid mandalas. In-fact, there is so much creativity happening from all the vendors I’ve tried, it is indeed a good time to be alive; a bit of a renaissance, if you will. Do I like it? Yes. What I can recall about Hindustan 1 is that I immediately found comparisons to the ethereal vapours and flavour of Chugoku Senkoh. Not an exact replica or attempt to be, but perhaps a first cousin. The smallest portion was extremely potent, it was humming 6 hours later with only a slight progression into warmer and upper mid-range notes. Bright, otherworldly, shimmering like the aurora borealis, purple quartz coloured tart berries....
I love progressive art as much as I love the classics. For me art is a living, evolving medium. Otherwise what do we have? Just museum pieces? Re-runs? Photocopies?
The current oud scene seems reminds me of a murder of cawing jazz fanatics.
“jazz is dixieland!”
“no, jazz is big band!”
”nope…west-coast bop or go home”
“shadaap! ….post-bop rules!”
“hell no, give me the new york loft scene!”
“I only listen to Cecil Taylor played at half-speed, man”
“modern jazz exists only in Scandinavia”….etc etc etc
Sniff ‘em if you got ‘em, live and let live, enjoy the beauty of this brief life we’ve been given by The Most High. Mind your adab and cultivate it. Apologies for the meandering babble.
*The opinions stated in this post are my own, and I am not liable for any lost time down any rabbit holes*