Plutonic Rainbows

I've been eager to explore Francis Kurkdjian's latest addition to La Collection Privée, which takes its inspiration from one of Dior's most iconic fashion pieces: the Saddle bag, originally designed by John Galliano in the early 2000s. What strikes me immediately is how Cuir Saddle deliberately subverts my expectations of what a leather fragrance should be. Rather than pursuing the heavy, smoky, tar-like qualities that define traditional leather compositions, Kurkdjian has softened and relaxed the structure into something closer to supple suede. I find the result fascinating — it blends conventional pyrogenated leather notes with a musky, creamy floral cloud and modern ambered woods, creating a scent that feels both tenacious and unexpectedly light, sensual yet approachable.

I should note this isn't Dior's first attempt at capturing the essence of fine leather goods in a bottle — I remember François Demachy's discontinued Cuir Cannage from 2014, which explored similar territory. But Cuir Saddle feels to me like a more refined evolution, one that acknowledges the codes of classic leather perfumery while steering them in a contemporary direction. Available as an Eau de Parfum starting at $220, it arrives in the signature cylindrical Collection Privée flacon accompanied by an elegant leather sheath that echoes the design language of its namesake bag. For those of us who find traditional leather fragrances too assertive, this softer interpretation might be precisely what I've been missing from the genre.

Reading reviews on the Extrait De Parfum editions that were released a few months ago.

So it turns out that I have to retrain images using the Flux.2 training model — this is in order to create loras that can be used with Flux.2 [dev].

This album reminds me of the comments once made by the film director, Bobby Roth on using Tangerine Dream to score a movie about golf.

Bobby Roth in 1991:

I'd done two films with TD prior to Dead Solid Perfect and I've done two more since. I chose them for a 'Dan Jenkins' working-class comedy about golf precisely because of how strange it seemed.

I tried both American blues and country and western songs with the rough cut but both seemed too much in keeping with the existing images. Neither lifted the film to a new place or transformed it with counterpoint. Choosing a German band known for electronic music seemed bizarre to the film's producers, but when they heard the score they loved it as I did. It made golf more interesting and let people who were adverse to the game see it with new eyes. Ask any hard and fast golfer about the film and they'll say the music is perfect (though it's certainly not music one would associate with the game under traditional circumstances). Ironically, of the five films I've done with Tangerine Dream, [...] the score for Dead Solid Perfect probably did the most for the movie.

Boomkat:

OPN's anachronistic soundtrack to Josh Safdie's Timothée Chalamet vehicle is a bedazzled synth-heavy celebration of influences he's been wearing on his sleeve since day one: Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Peter Gabriel and Philip Glass.

You might wonder why Lopatin decided to go back to the 1980s once again for this one when Safdie's film, a fictional biopic of Marty Reisman, is set in the 1950s. Well, Safdie was fascinated by table tennis as a kid in the 1980s and when he was brainstorming with Lopatin in the early stages of the process, was batting across names like New Order, Tears for Fears and Constance Demby - clearly inspirations that Lopatin was equally familiar with. So the project plays like an homage to their own teenage years, with nods to classic '80s film soundtracks and enough synthesized and sampled mallet sounds (that's gotta be a Fairlight CMI, right?) to make the ping-pong theme stand out whether you've peeped the movie itself or not.

Fans of Lopatin's earliest Oneohtrix Point Never records will be stoked; it's 'Russian Mind' upgraded, in many ways, with some of the composer's loftier influences (we can hear Morricone, Jarre, Vangelis and Glass quite clearly on the ambitious standout 'Holocaust Honey') realized properly now with a fitting budget. And although the 'Marty Supreme' soundtrack is confection next to this year's mind-altering 'Tranquilizer' set, it's undeniably enjoyable. If you enjoyed Lopatin's cues for 'Good Time' and 'Uncut Gems', this just takes it even further, proving that he's one of the most capable artists in the Hollywood ecosystem right now. If the 'Stranger Things' soundtrack has gone down in history as the Demogorgon of forced nostalgia, 'Marty Supreme' is fighting the good fight.

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