The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Steve Goodman's track 'Vacuum Burn' served as the starting point for this fragrance. Goodman works under the alias kode9, and the track's deep electronic textures became the conceptual foundation for Bass. The fragrance translates the track's lowest frequencies into scent, building from those heavy, resonant tones outward. What emerged is a composition that mirrors the track's intensity while remaining wearable on skin, turning a sonic experience into something you can carry with you throughout the day.
Mastic resin, tea, and castoreum share a pyramid in this unusual combination. Mastic provides a green, piney bite that most fragrances would smooth over with florals or fruit. Tea adds astringency without any citrus brightness. Castoreum, traditionally an animalic base note, offers warmth that reads as natural skin rather than synthetic musks. These materials interact with frankincense smoke and cedar to create something that moves between contemplative and animal, never fully resolving into either.
The evolution
It opens with a sharp crack, wood smoke and rum punching through simultaneously. The rum isn't sweet; it's dark, almost medicinal, and it lifts the smoke into something brighter than expected. Within minutes, the cedar arrives, overtaking the rum, and the smoke settles into a background hum. The heart is where it gets interesting: leather and mastic emerge together, the leather worn and the mastic green, while cold tea keeps everything slightly bitter and dry. This phase dominates the wear, holding the composition in a quiet, austere register. Then the castoreum surfaces, not animalic in a shock-value way but like warmth that wasn't there before, threading through the moss and frankincense. The drydown is smoky, mossy, intimate, with the cedar remaining as a constant thread beneath everything.
Cultural impact
Bass exists at the intersection of experimental music and niche perfumery. It shares conceptual territory with Comme des Garçons Series 3 Incense and État Libre d'Orange's experimental releases, with its sonic origin in a kode9 track giving it a particular audience within the niche fragrance community. The fragrance speaks to those who appreciate both electronic music and unconventional scent compositions.
The House
Ephemera by UnsoundEphemera is a niche fragrance line exploring the intersection of sound and scent. Berlin-based perfumer Geza Schoen created the collection in collaboration with Unsound Productions, the entity behind the Unsound Festival. The project operates as both a perfume line and a research laboratory dedicated to synaesthesia. Rather than conventional fragrance development, Schoen translated musical concepts into olfactory compositions by interviewing musicians about their earliest scent memories and building perfumes around their responses. This approach positioned Ephemera as an experimental art project rather than a traditional perfume brand. The collection centers on three compositions, each named after a sonic concept rather than a traditional fragrance family. The brand challenges the assumption that perfume must follow established olfactory categories, instead treating scent as a medium for sonic exploration.
The Creator
Geza SchönSchön strips fragrance to its functional core. His signature move is constructing around a single powerful molecule like Iso E Super, then letting it behave without interference.
