Capetonian perfumer Tammy Frazer and Joburg-based artist Nandipha Mntambo have teamed up to create Dissonance, a limited-edition bespoke fragrance that's accompanied by complementary lithographic prints.
Tammy talks us through their creative process:
What drew you to collaborate with Nandipha?
In 2012 I decided that my fragrance development also required an art exploration, so I created the "Skin Portraits" collaboration with a photographer and nine South Africans with different skins and histories. It was through this project I first met Nandipha.
I was inspired by Lucian Freud's portraiture and how the artist showed emotion and personality with just colours. I had to literally "get close" to all nine of my collaborator-subjects who included truly galvanising people like dancer Dada Masilo, Miss Earth Kirsten Carls, Dion Chang and Ndaba Mandela. 
That said, it was my conversations with Nandipha — about working with an artistic medium, the artistic process, history and skin — that led to the inspiration for Dissonance.
What does it mean for a fragrance to be 'dissonant'?
This means that there is a rupture between the individual notes. You experience a scent that is not cohesive, something that is disturbing but intriguing at the same time.Normally a fragrance is formulated to achieve balance and cohesive qualities: the combination of rosemary, neroli, lemon and lavender, for example, is a cologne 'accord' - so that at the end of the day you smell something new as all of these things come together.
For a dissonant perfume, you include something to give it a spark, something that's going to contradict what a normal fragrance does so that you give people an extra wonder.Take us on the Dissonance scent journey?
There is cleanliness throughout because of the grapefruit, basil and petitgrain. The clary sage is fresh, slightly floral, herbaceous and musky, which picks it up and takes it onto the resin note created by the opopanax, following through to the decadent tuberose embedded in a dark well of hay. This will evolve differently on the skin over time and with the heat of the body.
How did you and Nandipha reach this unusual formula?
Designing a perfume requires a multilayered approach similar to that of the artist's process. This was an intimate boundary-spanning, bespoke exploration with Nandipha. I would never have arrived at this ingredient construction on my own.
In a bespoke fragrance, we work through my nose and skills as a tool to creatively direct the client's own signature formulation.
With Nandipha, we started in her home country of Swaziland, researching where she grew up, the landscape, the grasslands, her memories, inspirations, smells and ingredients we found...