‘And a softness came from the starlight and
filled me full to the bone.’
From ‘The Wanderings of
Oisin’ by William Butler Yeats
I have been planning this
piece for a while, ever since I read David Moltz at D.S.& Durga was working
on a new creation for his atmospheric line of olfactive myth and poetry,
HYLNDS, a potent oeuvre inspired by the ghostly Celtic hinterlands of Northern
Europe.
I’m a huge fan of D.S.&
Durga; I think David Seth Moltz and his wife Kavi (Durga) Moltz have created
one of the most exciting and truly unique artisan fragrance lines of recent
years. Working out of Brooklyn the couple have really stoked the olfactory
imaginations of perfume addicts and writers like myself. I feel like a moth
pinned on their scented mood board of imagination. Style bibles love them and you
only have to Google them to see that the couple are indeed beautiful and perfectly
photogenic. David’s background as a musician and Kavi’s architectural training
only adds to the artistic layering of this talented duo.
D.S.& Durga started life
in 2007 with capsule batches of scent, tonics and colognes made exclusively for
friends and family. When David and Kavi got married he created three decadent
bespoke scents for the traditionally Indian tri-part ceremony..
‘I made three custom perfumes and sourced
really old bottles and vintage trays for each. Every one was delivered to Kavi
with a note that was sealed by candle wax.
The first scent was a neroli for party time. I
got the rarest expensive thing you could never mass-produce, and that went into
an Edwardian–era cut crystal with a silver flip top. That came on a pineapple
tray because our wedding was pineapple-themed. For the ceremony, the scent had
to be the most rich, unctuous thing. It was daffodil, rose, orange blossom, and
super heavy, and came in a little tiny French bottle from the 1940s. Then for
the nighttime, it was big and loud and sexy fun with big florals. That one came
in a turn-of-the-century round crystal bottle.
Kavi came down the aisle in a super-dramatic
red sari with tons of 24-karat gold. I could smell her when she came down that
way. I never, ever think I’m trying to capture the scent of love. That sounds
corny to me. It was really about her favorite things and complete and utter
decadence.’
David Moltz, from ‘5 Perfumers On The Best
Wedding Scent’
The Cut 01 August 2014
The emphasis has always been
on the made… everything close to hand. You can smell the hard work,
dedication and esoteric research that have gone into developing Durga scents. Materials
are sourced from a variety of unusual places and painstakingly prepared by
David in his atmospheric workshop. I have Mississippi
Medicine, Bowmakers and Burning
Barbershop in my collection, all of which I just adore, their mingle of
pure, guttural notes: smoke, mud,
pungent tingling sap, seared limes, violin workshops, shellac and wood dust.
The link to my piece on Mississippi
Medicine is here, I really loved writing this piece and still think it’s
one of the best things I’ve written:
The weird muffled beauty of Siberian Snow has recently begun to obsess me and will be next I think for
the collection. I have never really smelled anything like these dense, textured
Durga aromas before; coupled with a haunting sense of lost worlds, faded
Americana, art, history and personal topography, the collection of D.S. &
Durga fragrances are more like a sheaf of sepia photographs, discovered
dust-drenched behind failing walls. They tell stories, evoke memories and imply
perhaps that scent might be more than just juice in bottles. They are the ghost
towns of American perfumery. Amber-suspended moments of preserved history and
scented recall.
There was always a sense with
David Moltz though of something else, that while the essences of Durga were
rewarding and atmospheric, he was pushing at his definitions as an artist and
perfumer. There have been a number of innovative and lovely collaborations: Spent Musket Oil for BKLYN Dry Goods, Rodin for skin guru Linda Rodin and Staghorn Sumac with fellow Brooklynites
and neighbours, Joya. All the scented divergences and forays outside the core
line, while generally in keeping with the style of the brand’s aromatic motifs
hinted at development and a shift in tonal ambition.
This came to fruition in 2013
with the release of HYLNDS, a trio of three quite remarkable eaux de parfums, Bitter Rose, Broken Spear, Isle Ryder and Pale Grey Mountain, Small Black Lake. Anyone that owns these will
agree that these perfumes are exceptional. They glow and mutter like magic,
suggesting ritual and persuasive alchemy. The perfumes pay homage to the veils
of life and love hanging precariously between our worlds and the next, specifically
in the Manx, Angle, Irish, Pict, Orcadian, Gaelic histories and mythologies.
Many of these cultures have powerful storytelling traditions obsessed with the
travelling of love and desire across the shimmering veils.
My first HYLNDS was Spirit of the Glen, the fourth member of
the HYLNDS family and David Moltz’s collaboration with the Glenlivet distillery
in Speyside. Spirit of the Glen is a
dense, swirling scent inspired by the accords and effects produced during the
production of Glenlivet 18 malt. Damn,
it’s beautiful. A spun out superfine golden incarnation of Scottish eau de vie,
shot through with charred casks, pineapple grass, wild grasses, barley, oak and
the most delicious pear note which seems to burn across the top of the scent
like pale green fire. It is not just a capture of the ethereal spirit itself,
but a portrait of the local terroir as well, the windswept grasses and damp air
of Speyside.
Living here in Edinburgh, I
choose to love the rain, wind, damp and unpredictable climate of these northern
tropes. The skies are often low and glowering, the air moist with haar and
hops. But I would live nowhere else. If I venture north into the Highlands, I
am moved to silence by the sweep and towering awe of the landscape. The colours
and textures can shift and change in moments as weather and shadows roll like
raging moods across munro, loch and glen. HYLNDS perfumes reflect the hue and
cry of these Celtic emotions: stone, lichen, iron, heather, berry, larch,
woods, rushes, mist, rain and gelid romanticism. It’s a tricky subject, fraught
with dubious Lord of the Rings danger and elven soft-focus nonsense. But the
HYLNDS approach is one of chill and isolation, contemplation and stillness. The
fragrances feel lost in time; they are scented armour, worn like talismans to
protect us now in uncertain times.
Each of the HYLNDS perfumes resonates
with something frontier and fabled, an essence of aromas travelling through
time. They are fragrances that demand your attention, you need to engage with
the aromatic pieces. Like the original Durga line there is signature and mood
but this time, there are ghostly traces of dye and tincture, twine and
olfactive fibre woven through the formulae.
Bitter Rose, Broken Spear in many ways encapsulates the fierce beauty of
HYLNDS, a scent of antique iron smiting wet highland stone, sparks glittering
into foggy air. The notes include embers, wild mountain thyme, cubeb (an
aromatic sweet pepper), bitter rose, thistle, a lovely creamy nutmeg, smelted
iron, amber and cold damp larch. It is the scent of abandoned fires, damp and
dewy as the mist trembles on charred wood and stone.
It is the loneliest rose I
have worn; a rose forged in dark Celtic nights. I know the scent, it is all
around us as the troubled question of identity rolls across Scotland and we
ponder the resonance of our own personal histories in the flickering shadow of post-referendum
heartache. The iron spear will shatter on bitter rocks, as roses burn in the
night. As the scent fades on skin there is a swell of sadness, lost in sweeping
rain. It is odd to think of scent having weather, but David Moltz has always
composed his work like art, with washes of colour and climate behind the notes.
It is necessary. It enforces the beauty of the accords and persuades the wearer
they inhabit their own scented landscape.
Foxglove
is the latest addition to the HYLNDS line and I bought it blind, convinced it
would be extraordinary. It was, but not quite in the way I imagined. I think Foxglove might be David Moltz’s most
concealed and dazzling composition to date. It is daring and poignant perfumery
by someone who has assembled emotion, story, abstraction and desire into a
scent of ephemeral power.
Foxgloves or digitalis (which means fingerlike) has lots of associative
folklore, mostly with witchcraft and fairy folk. Their distinctive bell-shaped
flowers have over the years led to numerous names such as Bloody Fingers, Witches’
Gloves, Deadman’s Bells and Gloves of our Lady. The tall and stately
collections of trumpet-shaped bells come in many shades of speckled and smeared
blues, pinks and lilacs. The flowers themselves are poisonous, the main
component, digitalin is used to
regulate irregular heartbeats, but can kill at higher doses. An old saying states that foxgloves ‘..can raise the dead and kill the living.’
It was German herbalist Leonard Fuchs who first labelled this most iconic of
blooms digitalis as its official Latin and scientific name. Digitabulum is Latin for thimble and Fuchs
used the adjectival version. The German word for foxglove is actually fingerhut, the same as thimble. The
French call them gantelée or little glove.
Scandinavian legend has it
that fairy folk taught foxes to ring the little floral bells to warn of any
approaching hunters. My favourite story is of foxes wearing the bell-shaped
flowers on their feet to muffle the sound of their paws as they raided farms
and henhouses. The most likely origin of the name sadly probably has nothing to
do with foxes, much as it pains me to say it; folksglove is perhaps the original name, in reference to the fairy
or little magic folk and over time the name has slurred and corrupted into
foxglove. I do prefer the soft-shoed foxes version though…
HYLNDS’Foxglove is about vigil. The desolation of lonely attendance over a
love lost to time. The perfume is inspired by the story of Oisin, the Irish warrior
poet, his lover Niamh and the mystical land of Tir Na Nog, the tempting Land
Of Youth. Foxglove is Niamh,
watching devotedly over the final resting place of her lyrical lover. David
Moltz visited Oisin’s resting place and found a solitary foxglove about 20 feet
from the grave. This lonely bloom, keeping vigil, was the catalyst for David’s
perfumery imagination to wander, harvest and paint.
In keeping with the pattern
he has set with previous HYLNDS fragrances, Foxglove
balances myth and landscape in order to tell its misty story. This signature of
the HYLNDS line of background and setting gives the fragrances weather, soil,
climate, sound and texture. The environment is vital to David; he absorbs the
elements like a olfactory sponge and then leaks them out in tones of ochre,
lovat, cranberry, broom, heather, aqua, iron and lichen.
Reading the notes on paper,
especially the suede, iris and peach skin lying deep in the base notes made me
imagine something very different in style from previous HYLNDS pieces, but I
couldn’t quite imagine how these notes would be assembled by David. I just knew
it would be beautiful.
It was. The opening burst of
hyper-real citrus peel is huge, like a sudden Celtic shower. It has a heady
polished aroma which is dazzling in its reach. Champaca and the Queens Anne
Lace, a form of wild carrot lend bite and radiance to the swelling pelt effect
of soft, supple suede. This note is amplified by the iris and to a certain
degree by the weird carrot effect, which smells anisic and woody. It becomes
obvious that Foxglove is something
out of time and of the future, a
masterly echo of classical French perfumery tenets with touches of haunting
things to come. Everything is in place for the skin to murmur.. I am Foxglove, I bear Guerlain and Caron in
my wild, Brontean genetics.
It is the remarkable peach
skin note that really stuns me in Foxglove.
I can’t get over how it has been rendered with such 3D clarity. The odour of
ripe peaches is one of life’s most sensual experiences, a scent like none
other, heightened I think by the blush velveteen pelt of the fruit. No other
fruit has the same sensation. In fragrance it is the luscious anchor of Mitsouko, Jacques Guerlain’s spicy essay
in sweet melancholia from 1919. Gucci’s porn-drenched trashy neon Rush from 1999 is soaked in an
incendiary peach gauze thrown over the mix and then set on fire. Parfums Mugler
used it beautifully in the heady cocoa flanker of Angel in the Le Goût du
Parfum series in 2011. The oozing peach added a much-needed balance of
tropical sweetness to the dense chocolate and caramel blend.
It is however virtually
impossible in this perfumed day and age to create a peach and orris scent
without noting echoes of Jacques Guerlain’s haunting and luminous chypré Mitsouko. His legendary 1919 classic was
inspired by a character in Claude Farrère’s novel La Bataille about the doomed love affair between a British naval
officer and the wife of a Japanese naval admiral during the Russo-Japanese war.
Jacques Guerlain was apparently a friend of the author. Mitsouko was the one of the first perfumes to utilise a synthetic
peach effect, more specifically C14 aldehyde, technically not an aldehyde, but
a lactone: gamma-undecalactone. This revolutionary abstract note in many ways
changed perfumery forever and many experts and fragrance historians consider Mitsouko the epitome of concise,
exquisite chypré structure. Jacques Guerlain’s magical composition would not be
Mitsouko without the orris though, the
silvery powdered note extracted from the rhizome of the ghostly iris. It is the
eau de parfum concentration of vintage Mitsouko
that seems to haunt Foxglove, that
Guerlain-esque balancing act between the actuality of sheer, breathing skin and
bitter herbal aromatics. The sense of actual furred peach skin is quite
distinctive as the rootiness of the orris settles through the jasmine, rose,
spice and molten amber.
Persicol
the famous peach lactone base has never really been matched in terms of its
unique transformative effect in scent, its ability it create a shimmering
sensation of fur and liquidity in the perfumes it was added to. This use of
bases (like Prunol, Mousse de Saxe
and the infamous Animalis by Albert
Fraysse’s Synerome)resulted in
perfumes of unparalleled depth,
roundness and complexity. Creating the same intensity of effect now is very
hard indeed, without the fragrance smelling cheap and empty.
This is why David Moltz’s
extraordinary handling of the peach skin effect in the base of Foxglove is so jaw-dropping. It smells
so vintage, the call across time to Mitsouko
is bold and beautiful and yet it is entirely its own olfactory creature, plush,
vibrant and quixotic. Blended to perfection with the nuttiness of the wild
carrot and soft glimmered iris.
My friend and perfumer Mr E
has been sniffing Foxglove for me and
helping me navigate how we think David might have built this rather dazzling
effect. It’s fun to wonder. I’m not keen on asking perfumers to give up heir
secrets anyway. A little mystery is always more alluring than total
transparency. Mr E helped me with the armomachemical
stuff I mentioned above and suggested too that a CO2 extract of peach saturated
in fructose/fruanone might also have been used. Another lactone,
gamma-octalactone imparts a delicious milky tropical coconut facet to
compositions; used with caution, it can add the most subtle and glowing effect
of fruity light. We can only speculate. David, if you read this – Bravo!
The immortelle is important
as Foxglove settles into its final
beautiful stages, laying down stability and a warm shrubby licquorice facet. Mixed
with the supple, cool suede and an extremely realistic ambergris effect, all
these combine to anchor and draw out a scent with remarkable longevity and
projection. There is tenderness too, in the incredibly graceful fade.
I sprayed Foxglove into the crook of a slightly
fevered arm and drifted off into erratic sleep. After eight hours the residue
was sublimely soft, a diaphanous peachy skein of worn hide, with a sigh of
druggy champaca lingering like smoke. It was then I really felt the echoes of a
desolate, skeletal Mitsouko, a
ghostly presence of pelty skin that demonstrates David Moltz’s precise and
imaginative control of his medium.
The mélange of wild carrot
(smells a tad like ambrette…), iris and suede provide a swell of aerated
texture for the melancholy flounce of peach fuzz and golden odour. Foxglove is quite simply the most captivating
creation to wear and perhaps the most refined and surprising perfume to date
from the HYLNDS line.
The eerie, doomed tale of Oisin travelling to Tir-Na-Nog and losing himself in what he
thinks is three days of love for the comely Niamh is a compelling romance,
forged in darkness and lonely weather-torn elements. The enchantment is carried
through into a scent of wonder and singular sorcery. Osin’s return is bleak,
his life is gone, every one he has known and loved is gone. His three days was
three centuries and life has changed forever. Love is reduced to vigil, a
single pink foxglove watching over an eternal resting place.
David and Kavi Moltz are very
adept at avoiding the potential clichéd pitfalls of this kind of scented
storytelling. Instead of sentiment there is bleakness and the odour of
attendance. With Foxglove, there is a
potent sense of classicism; we are smelling future skin, the scent of things to
come. To all intents and purposes, David Moltz is a resolutely scented time
traveller, pulling us back and forth with him in his quixotic quest to
re-engineer our senses with didactic wonder. I will travel with him, the
inhaling and scented weather will be unforgettable.
For further information on HYLNDS and D.S.& Durga, please follow the link below:
