Attuned: A Spring Playlist on Hypnopompia
Exploring the space between sleeping & waking with Jonathan Sielaff
For this season’s Beauty School playlist, we’re pleased to share Portland-based musician and perfumer Jonathan Sielaff’s soundtrack for the early days of spring: those moments of shifting light, softening air, and everything stirring beneath the surface.
Known for his solo work as a bass clarinetist and as half of the experimental duo Golden Retriever, Jonathan also creates fragrance alongside his partner, Heather Sielaff, at OLO—where the pair hand blends and bottles every every scent in-house. His is a practice that moves fluidly between mediums, one rooted in material and improvisation, but guided by a deeply felt attention to atmosphere, resonance, and emotional presence.
We’re always guided by the potency of cross-pollination—of letting one sense inform another, and of looking at familiar ideas through unfamiliar lenses. Jonathan embodies this spirit: Whether composing a soundscape or building a fragrance, his work invites us to follow feeling first, trusting that something meaningful will emerge when we do.
His spring playlist centers on the analogy of hypnopompia: the transitional state between sleep and wakefulness, “a place where I find a lot of creativity and new ideas,” he writes. “These are all pieces I felt were beautiful and gave me a sense of that hazy, hallucinatory space when you wake naturally from a night’s rest—some more 'dreamy,' flowing into others more 'awake.' The transition is not always instant (for waking or spring), so there are peaks and valleys in the flow of the tracks like you are rolling in and out of consciousness.”
Alongside the playlist, Jonathan also shared a selection of his film photography—quiet, textural images that echo that liminality and serve as a visual counterpart to our conversation on process, presence, and what it means to compose with the ephemeral.
Stream Jonathan’s Spring ‘Hypnopompia’ Playlist
Listen to past Beauty School playlists: Spring | Summer | Autumn | Winter
When you begin creating something new, are you typically setting out to capture a specific feeling or idea? And later, how do you recognize when a piece is finished?
My starting point is typically material—even if I'm beginning with a specific feeling or idea (for example, "tropical" for a perfume or "winter" for a piece of music). I usually pick a fragrance material or a musical element that I associate with that idea, and then improvise with that material until I find a place that resonates. That might reinforce the initial idea or it may take me in a completely different direction. The improvisation and exploration is the fun part! You never know where it's going to take you.
Finishing a project is very difficult for me. My tendency is to overwork things, so I usually need to take a step back and get some objective distance and then come back to it and see if it feels “ready.” I might still wanna tweak it a little bit, but if it feels good when I come back to it, I know it's pretty much done. Other times, you just have to shelve it for a while longer…or let it go and start with a new idea.
Is there a particular time of day or physical space where your creative thinking feels most alive? What rituals or conditions do you protect to nurture this creativity?
Creatively, ideas can come at any time. Often in the evening when I can shut my work brain off a little or when waking first thing in the morning. But my most productive work time is between 10am-4pm. I use voice memo or the Notes app to jot down ideas as they come. I'll add to them as I think over them here and there. Then, when I have time to work on them, I'll schedule a day during my high energy hours to get it done.
I try to make space throughout the day to daydream and let my mind wander. Maybe laying in bed on a day off, over coffee in the morning, reading in the evening, while walking or driving, or when I’m listening to music. These moments tend to be when ideas come or when I have the space to mull over an idea and flesh it out in my head.
Both music and fragrance exist in time, appearing and then fading. How does this ephemeral quality influence your approach to creation?
Cool question! Smell and sound are particularly visceral for human beings. It's typically hard to have any intellectual distance or perspective like we can with sight; both trigger something subconscious in us. Because of that, I try to be really attuned to the visceral experience of the scent or musical experience—what does it feel like?
It doesn't matter what you want to accomplish intellectually if the physical experience doesn’t reinforce it. That experience can then leave a ghost—or the scent or sound version of an afterimage—that stays with you, subtly altering how you perceive other smells or sounds you encounter. It's subjective, but something I try to keep in mind.
I'm usually very focused on the arc and shape of the composition. I like things that have a sense of continuity and flow, and generally prefer subtle shifts and gradual evolutions over abrupt changes.
What is something fragrance has taught you about music? What is something composing music has taught you about creating fragrance?
There's a lot of crossover and I think they definitely reinforce each other. Coming from a background in musical improvisation has helped me trust my intuition in fragrance creation. When you know the materials and how they interact, you can kind of "feel out" the composition. Sometimes capturing that initial inspiration is more important than a perfect composition; sometimes the first take is the best.
Making perfume has helped me to think about musical creation in terms of "presence." Not to think about it so architecturally—which is my tendency even in improvisation. Fragrance is more about creating an "aura", i.e. how does it drift in a room? If you experience it during its beginning, middle or end is it still cohesive?
Have you experienced moments where your senses crossed boundaries—perhaps a sound that evoked a specific smell, or a scent that seemed to have its own melody?
My synesthesia is not very strong like Heather's [Jonathan’s partner, Heather Sielaff of OLO Fragrances], who smells shapes and colors very clearly. But what I have tends to go in the direction of music or sound evoking fragrance. For me, sound is more abstract and open to interpretation while scent feels more concrete and physical. I am working on a fragrance with a friend that will be a part of a concert this summer. The fragrance will be completed first, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that influences the shape of the music.
What’s the most invisible part of your work—the thing no one notices, but everything depends on?
All the practice! Hours and hours. With music, the bass clarinet is a very physical instrument and requires an immense amount of diligent practice to make it sound effortless.
With fragrance, countless hours of learning and memorizing the characteristics of materials and how they interact. Not to mention all the little things required to run a small business. Heather and I do everything. Ordering supplies, blending formulas, bottling, packaging, shipping, plus doing taxes and things like that make up about 90% of the work. Only about 10% of it is the fun, creative stuff!
Spring Playlist: Hypnopompia, curated by Jonathan Sielaff
Ensenada / Bennie Maupin
L'autre rive / Pierre Barouh
Los Periquitos / Tindersticks
Annica / Harlan Silverman
Calypso / Gigi Masin
Far Away / Eddie Chacon
Cristo Redentor / Duke Pearson
Joy / Clarice Jensen
Past + Present = Future / Bennie Maupin
Differences Aside / Loverman
Default to Truth / Spatial Relations
VIGIL / Dean Blunt
Sunlight / Max Richter
Descending (feat. Brian Green) / Sam Wilkes
42nd Street Shuffle / Rikard From
Drive My Car (Misaki) / Eiko Ishibashi
Marina / Ulla
The Milky Sea / Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Camino Del Sol / Antena
Make It With You / Ralfi Pagan
Baby Forgive Me (Young Marco Remix) / Robyn
Up on the Sun / Meat Puppets
Mr Joy / Paul Bley Trio, John Gilmore, Billy Elgart, Gary Peacock
Woven Song - piano reworks / Hania Rani, Ólafur Arnalds
Dream / Raffaele Grimaldi, John Cage
Head Soothe / Other Lands
See Her Out (Thats Just Life) / Francis and the Lights
Peace Piece / Bill Evans
More from Jonathan:
Listen to Golden Retriever (Jonathan’s band)