I’m All Lost In, #102: Iroiro; Cognoscenti; Schuyler.
I’m All Lost In…
the 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#102
1) The Avant-garde Sounds of Iroiro
Kento Oiwa summons spooky sounds from his theremin, 9/13/25
It was all classic rock last Friday night. No, not Led Zeppelin nor Aerosmith. Classic Seattle rock—which means those legions of unsigned (and a few signed) Capitol Hill practice-space bands who defined the city circa 1995-2000 in the aftermath of the grunge and Riot Grrrl earthquakes.
This Seattle sound could be much-too-macho. And it actually differed little from the boorish aesthetics of classic rock. But there were also artistic kooks and besmirchers in the mix who, seizing the next-Nirvana moment, were queering and re-imagining.
It was a mini-‘90s reunion at Slim’s Last Chance in Georgetown on Friday where three of that era’s quirkier combos re-took the stage: Parini, a speed-metal-adjacent punk duo starring anti-diva Lisa Orth on distortion guitar and spat vocals paired with her superpowers drummer, longtime local arts polymath Dan Paulus; the Ononos, think pop opera noise pioneers Suicide at CBGB in 1976 (or Klaus Nomi) with sci-fi drag and dark synth drones by pro-diva front-man Marcus Wilson and beats scientist Ross Marshall, respectively; and the opening act, and leading this week’s obsession list: Iroiro, a Seattle treasure starring experimental synthesizer composer Michiko Swiggs and one-man electric guitar army and theremin muse Kento Oiwa. Once upon a time (1998-2004), Swiggs and Oiwa led IQU, the improvisatory soundscape K Records act who veered imaginatively into lo-fi pop.
Thank our lucky stars the pair has re-emerged in 2025. Calling themselves Iroiro, they’ve assembled a more traditional quartet this time around (they’ve added rock drums and bass) with Oiwa’s guitar in the spotlight; at least judging by his frequent sonic freak outs during Friday night’s mesmerizing performance. Appearing to merge with the music, Oiwa conjured psilocybin melodies and occult sine waves from his electric guitar and haunted theremin alike. Swiggs provided an ethereal foundation on synth while the bass and drums added groove and rock meter to their all-instrumental set.
Michiko Swiggs on synth with Iroiro, 9/13/25
Swiggs and I are old acquaintances from the days when we both worked at the city’s alt weekly, The Stranger. Catching up on the back patio at Slim’s she reminded me that I once cheered the more avant side of an IQU show after they’d played the storied Seattle art space On the Boards back in the early 2000s. If memory serves, Oiwa weaved his esoteric theremin signals in and out of Swiggs’ cool synth lines on that epic night as well.
Swiggs also reports that Iroiro—evidently enamored with the experimental side of Seattle rock too—is playing Ballard’s rave performance space the Substation on October 7. I’ll be there.
2) The Perfume Vial Trials
Back in late 2023, I put DIY San Francisco-based perfume company COGNOSCENTI on my obsessions list [I’m All Lost In, #6, 11/23/23.]
I’m obsessing about COGNOSCENTI again because after recently ordering a four-ampule tester set, they went ahead and sent me eight; that works out to a $5-per-2.5-ml-vial bargain. I’ve been testing them all week.
I suspect the neighborly customer service was related to the playful email exchange I had with COGNOSCENTI “Scent Artist” Danielle, who quote: “lets intuition guide her creative process [by] following the colors of each element along multiple paths.”
Dianne responded to my initial order with a warm email that noted I was a repeat customer and asked “Did you want to swap out any of the samples? Typical set doesn’t have any of the Dark Lovelies: Warrior Queen, Wild Child or Vespertine…” I emailed back: “Please sub in any dark lovelies you see fit.” And stealing her language, I added that I liked “darker” muskier, male scents best.
I now have Wild Child and Warrior Queen (with, among other notes, labdanum, vetiver, cocoa, sandalwood, and amber in the mix) both queued up in this week’s perfume testing parade.
So far I’ve tried four scents—No. 1 Bergamot Sage; No. 16 Tomato Leather; No. 17 Civet Chypre; and No. 30 Hay Incense; coincidentally, and I didn’t realize this, Hay Incense is the scent I ordered back in November 2023, though at that time, I ended up preferring the complimentary sample they sent along, No. 44 Fire and Rain.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet this week toward the ultimate goal of choosing one sexy sexy go-to. Good old Hay Incense has the best marks; I think the oakwood is giving it the Darth Vader meets hippie profile I like. But actions speak louder than written words and mostly I find myself going back to th Bergamot Sage; it has teak, light musk, suede, and fig. There’s also sage, pink grapefruit and ylang ylang in there which may explain why I wrote “a subtle blend of masc & fem” in my COGNOSCENTI database.
Left to try: No. 32 Blue Oud and the aforementioned Wild Child and Warrior Queen (which are apparently so mysterious they don’t come with official numbers). And as fate would have it, 2023’s favorite smoky choice Fire and Rain is still on tap.
3) The Selected Poems of James Schuyler
I want to say I’m obsessed with 20th century American poet James Schuyler at the moment. Despite being grouped with John Ashbery and (poets’ poet darling) Frank O’Hara as part of the famed 1950s and ‘60s “New York School of Poets,” Schuyler (1923-1991) wasn’t on my radar until this year when hyper eloquent New Yorker poetry critic Dan Chiasson reviewed a new biography about him.
All Schuyler’s flora aside (henna withys, asters, birches), his poems do remind me of chatty O’Hara—the snippets of conversations with friends, the nonchalant stream of consciousness, the hot take asides, and the dispatches from the flow of daily life; “A blue towel,” about a day at the beach and the shower and chill-out cocktails back at the rental afterward, is perfect Schuyler (and O’Hara in Montauk perhaps!).
We sat and sunned/—it was late, no tan today—/and watched the repetitions/of the sea, each one/different from the last,/and saw how a log was/almost hurled ashore then/taken back, slipping north/along the shore. The flies/were something else. “These insects are too much: let’s/go back.” The blue towel/and your trunks I hung out/on the line. You took a/shower. I made drinks. Quiet/ecstasy and sweet content,/why are not all days like/you?
Simultaneously cranky and effusive, as he is about the beach and similarly here in “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,”
…and why did/Fairy Soap vanish and/Crouch and Fitzgerald survive?/Fairy Soap was once a/household word! I’ve been living at Broadway and West 74th/for a week and still haven’t/ventured on a stroll in/Central Park, two bizarre blocks away. (Bizarre is for the ex-/town houses, mixing Byzantine/with Gothic and Queen Anne.)/My abstention from the park/is for Billy Nichols who went/bird-watching there and, for/his binoculars, got his/head beat in…
Schuyler’s verse lives up to his “New York School” comrade John Ashbery’s concise summary. In the intro to the collection I’m reading, Selected Poems (1988) Farrar Straus Giroux, Ashbery writes of Schuyler: “The poems are seldom ‘about’ anything in the way poetry traditionally is: they are the anything. To reread him is to live, as though life were an experience one had just forgotten and been newly awakened to.”
Ashbery uses a lovely repeating Schuyler line (from a 1950s Schuyler villanelle simply titled “Poem”) to flag Schuyler’s trademark credo of poetry as cataloguing:
“What is, is by its nature, on display.”
Oddly though, Ashbery fails to note Schuyler’s repeating rhymed rejoinder from the same villanelle: “I do not always understand what you say,” which surely echoes Ashbery’s astute observation. In short, there may be nothing here to “understand” in “the way poetry traditionally” seeks to be understood. Rather, the reader should savor Schuyler’s snapshots for the images in their own right.
I’ve been tacking to the shorter poems in this collection, but I have begun wading into Schuyler’s 40+ page stream-of-consciousness neighborhood-walk poem, 1980’s “The Morning of the Poem.” I’m about 15 pages in and so far the Schuyler credo holds; though as Chiasson points out in the aforementioned New Yorker article, Schuyler’s observational mode begins leaving room for tangents.
In “Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A few days,” as well as in mid-length works such as the magnificent “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” Schuyler began to pry open the passing moments, inserting memories of his childhood and early adulthood, homages to old love affairs, and New York gossip from the forties and fifties. These poems invent verbal models of movement through time, their own temporal construction also serving as their subject...
I would add that the juxtaposition between Schuyler’s AP-style dispatches and the synaptic connections they spark also “pry open”—as default subtitles to the factual reports— the “meaning” that supposedly isn’t there. In that context, Schuyler’s rhyming rejoinder—“I do not always understand what you say”—reads more like a yearning plea. A call to dig in.
Luckily, I still have 33 pages left in “The Morning of the Poem,” which won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.
P.s. I started this item by stating, perhaps curiously now that you’ve read my mini-exegesis, how “I want to say I’m obsessed with James Schuyler.” What keeps me from saying I am obsessed with James Schuyler (and what’s been pulling me away from the frankly challenging “The Morning of the Poem,”) is that I’m also reading a paperback I picked up at JFK last month: a YA soft-fantasy novel called Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe (very me, right?) by a young, queer Asian American writer named C.B. Lee.
The premise is adorable: Unbeknownst to the two alternating, high school-aged narrators, Type A to-do-list and brainy Brenda and insouciant and incorrigible rebel Kat, their fateful crush-inducing first meeting evidently took place during some sort of flicker in the space time continuum when their respective parallel universes momentarily overlapped. Bereft Brenda in Chapter 7 and “WTF?!” Kat in Chapter 8 each recount how the other stands them up on their date to meet again at the same curious coffee shop. Brenda’s there at the appointed time. Kat’s there at the appointed time. But they’re not there at the same time.
C.B. Lee is not a particularly good writer, and they much-too-obviously grew up reading Harry Potter; derivative doesn’t even begin to describe this book. And if you’re not a D & D enthusiast (I’m not and never was) plenty of references will fly over your head.
Regardless, this sweet novel and Schuyler’s meaninfgul poetry have been my parallel universes this week.