Catherine Haley Epstein On The Scent of Records

It’s 95 degrees outside and my son and I are unpacking a surprise '80s set of 45s I bought last month.

I ask him what the 80s records smelled like, and expectedly he said “antique stores”. I took a whiff myself and thought it smelled of my time as a 10-year-old.

Aging myself properly I will say that the Xanadu 45 smelled like sweaty leg warmers and leather ballet shoes after a night of dance class, and the Chaka Khan 45 smelled like fun dip on a warm humid day in Boston.

Music and scent are bedfellows. You can’t explain a song with words just as you cannot explain a scent with words: they live in a floating, pre-lingual space that tickles our unconscious while bringing us fully to the present moment.

Listening to music on a record player brings music even closer to scent’s stubbornly analog state.

You can make scent and sound with notes, compositions, and organs. They both invite curiosity and wonder - how are those sounds coming off a finely lined piece of plastic? How does invisible sound and scent work?

I know I spent hours at a time as a child listening to Sleeping Beauty on a record, getting scared to death and assuring myself that Maleficent won’t jump off that flat, round disk, though somehow, she felt right there in my room.

I also can’t exactly tell you how a cafeteria-turned dance hall for eighth graders smells like, but somehow when I read these words, I can smell it right away.

A few hours after we unpacked our 80s records, I walked downstairs and peeked around the corner to see my son sitting quietly listening to Nicola Conte on the record player - completely still and enraptured. I think his 10-year-old scented music memories might be more sophisticated than my hot pink scented 80s memories of Kajagoogoo and friends. His favorite song on the album is “The Dharma Bums”, and I won’t share it with him yet, but to me that song smells like fresh cut grass, a mint julip and warm nuts.

Smell you later!

| Catherine Haley Epstein is an artist and writer living in the Pacific Northwest. She has won awards for her art and writing articles about scent. She founded the Odorbet, a growing vocabulary for our noses and in 2019 she wrote Nose Dive, a book for those seeking creative potential with their noses.