ghoulnextdoor

Oil of Flight & Vision is rooty and resinous, dark and droll, and brings to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Hamatreya”, in which the poet reveals the earth song of dark-humored flowers, laughing to see the men who steer the plows unable to steer clear of the grave. How every one of them who lay claim to the land, who wished to control it, are now asleep beneath the very dirt they thought they owned. I like to imagine subversive, psychoactive roots and blossoms,--hallucinogenic henbane, tarry opium, bittersweet mugwort--growing from the bones of those dead and being used in enigmatic preparations like fabled witches’ flying ointments. And whether or not those witchly botanical balms induced actual levitation and soaring under a full moon through the midnight air or was key to a ritual for one to travel the astral planes in spirit, I delight in the imagery of witches being borne aloft on the musky-throated gallows humor of grim growing things sprung forth from and thriving in grave dirt. Oil and Flight and Vision perfectly encapsulates the poetry of that sentiment.

Time is a Phoenix is a scent of the mythical and miraculous, but also of the intensely, personally, mundane. Fed on tears of sacred incense, resinous and volcanic, honeyed and bittersweet, fanning its own ancient, acrid spice-scented flames, a fiery vision of scarlet and gold and eternal return, the scent left in wake of this being is incendiary, incandescent, immortal. But there is also this. A funeral pyre flipped through a pinhole in the darkened chamber of a camera obscura, the ashes of the afterimage captured in a winding sheet of amber: the wild, joyful zest of loving, the sour sighing sorrow of leaving, the impossible weeping, sweating, earthly-tethered, salty-sweetness of living– and through it all, climbing into our own, us-shaped mortal infernos, again and again, and again. {TLDR; it’s very earthy, warm, rich resins and spice}

I wore The Queen of May on my birthday, and it is without question a scent of the riotous pageantry of blooms flourishing madly, an exuberant brightness of petals every shade of the spectrum, primrose and poppy, cornflower and calendula, lilac and lily are a few that I envision but it could be all or none of them! Florals delicate, milky, and sweet as well as earthy, green, and bitter, they could have hallucinogenic or aphrodisiac qualities, or they could have a soporific effect and induce the most beautiful dreams of flower-crowned celebrations and dizzying Maypole dances. Beneath these flower’s roots, as the fragrance unfolds on the skin, is a heart note echoing with the whispers of dried bouquets and a phantom whiff of marshmallow musk.

Ah, yes. The legendary salacious kiss bestowed upon the devil’s bunghole. A supposed diabolic perversion of the church’s Kiss of Peace. Classic Witchsploitation. All jokes about the devil’s butthole aside, Osculum Infame is a very intimate scent. Delicate, though. I wouldn’t go as far as to say primal. The notes of raw honey and black amber are soft and languid, but most assuredly at the forefront, heightening and preserving the sweetness of everything in their wake. The sap more crystalline, the candied fruits more sugared, the resinous musk of the labdanum somehow fruitier. The scent of paying tribute to Satan’s fundament smells pretty amazing, actually.

Leather and strange, bitter powder, mineralic like a finely ground rock and rain. Sediment from ghostly carvings on exposed bedrock in hollow, liminal spaces where cave meets coastline, land meets water. The descent into a dream, the dust in the footprints you followed in the hopes to meet yourself and give yourself what you needed most. The sweetness at the end of a cosmic journey, musky and sweet, cognac and mallow, deep, satisfied swallows of this honeyed brew.

A scent fumaceous and piquant, fiery groves of birch, cypress, and pine, sizzling wafts of charring campfire, wisps of aromatic herbs and spices spindling in a smoky column toward heaven, and a tin mug of lapsang souchong tea under the pinprick glow and atmospheric glittering of one hundred thousand stars.

There are so many *perfect* scents in this collection, but every time I sniff the uncanny geography of The Lilac Wood I think, ah, this, THIS is the one! Green sap and misty grass, peaceful, delicate moss, emerald ferns, and the wistful dreams of flowers in a patch of shade underneath the old ash tree with the lightning-riven trunk

This is a deliriously ethereal, gauzy, gossamer slip of a scent, with that wintry, woody orris and the aqueous verdancy of the lettuce, and the white quartz, snow-melt nip of chilled water with the tiniest bite of bitterness, the last drop in an icy chalice of sorrow. But there’s a carnal quality there, too, of worldly concerns and sensual delights, like…cupcakes. A mild cocoa butter creaminess and a milky nuttiness coalesce to form a tiny mythical gateau, a small frosted treat with a floral crumb sprinkled with a scattering of star shards– that one might leave out to lure magical creatures… fairies or pixies… or even unicorns.

The Butterfly is fizzy and effervescent, somehow both airy and earthy, the petitgrain so lemony and peppery, and the amber so honeyed…they’re so sweet and playful together. In the bottle, it’s deeply loamy–that sweet, dark, earthy scent that I love so very much!– but on the skin, the scent lightens in such a strange way that has to do with the absence of shadow more than any direct brightness. It is velvety and opulent, but it’s finery worn in jest.

I inhale this scent and my heart instantly hears “I know you. I’d be blind and I’d know what you are.” Schmendrick brings me to tears. An earthy, woodsy, deeply aromatic tobacco leaf, vanilla-y, apple-y chamomile, and a thoughtful, pruney musk.

I adore the summer scent of sweet musky floral orange blossom, so Bergamot, Orange Blossom and vetiver was destined for greatness long before I held the small amber bottle in my hands. The vetiver adds a bitter earthiness that binds the shimmering honeyed blossoms and tells a long-forgotten story of how you sobbed your broken heart into an orange grove at midnight; you gathered the dirt and tears and blossoms and clouds that floated across the moon and hid them all in the pages of an old diary because you were young and sad and then you burned the whole thing for incense as a middle-aged woman and thought wow that was a good choice even though it felt scary and sad at the time

Alleviate the Frenzy has presented me with a flummox of a peach, and it’s got me in quite a state. It’s a slightly sweet and toasted bit of warm, tilted at odd angles with a wonderful sour musk, and it recalls for me Letter 8 in a collection of bizarre correspondence by the hand of surrealist art-witch Remedios Varo. The author has sent a missive to an unidentified scientist with regard to dissolving the skin of a peach, but through the circumstance of a cat’s meow and the mishap of a stranger’s miscast shadow, she has instead dissolved a hole in the atmosphere. This peach presents a shifting cipher whose charms I would very much like to mail a stranger about.

Grief Moth Part II is a scent that gently arms the wearer with a little lightness and a small measure of hope when you wake of a morning, limbs weighted with the crushing gravity of grief and soul wracked with the shivers of sorrow. When in those seconds your eyes adjust to the light through the curtains and you think, “I have no heart for it all today.” But our stubborn human hearts, they keep on beating, don’t they? “Approaching sorrow,” reveals Francis Weller in The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief “requires enormous psychic strength.” And though in the frozen time/cracked-watch face/inexorable slowness of loss it feels as though those moments of darkness and despair will last forever, the throb and thrum of your heart reminds you that (as it’s been said by many) that grief is your love living on, persevering–and this is a thing to cherish, a sacred strength that asserts itself despite ourselves. It’s a fearful thing to love what death can touch–but we keep doing it, beautiful, amazing fools that we are. And that in that timeworn compulsion lies the soft, quiet joys of this fragrance of subtle, diffusive woods and bittersweet balsamic sap and resin, rich, resilient soil and stone, and a delicate floral-fruity tannic tang. The only way out is through, but sometimes we need a little help reaching the other side. Grief Moth Part II is a beautiful scent of belief and elusive hopefulness that may light a lantern to lead the way.

Grief Moth is a fragrance of half-light glooms, that liminal borderland of light and dark accessed between wakefulness and dream. When the mind, half-shrouded in night, barely begins to discern the glow of the sun beyond closed eyes, but the temporal curtain of the eyelid has not yet revealed its truth. In this place, all things are possible, nothing is beyond your grasp, and in these shadows you are safe and held. These are the soils where, in nocturnal sublimity, your subconscious has struggled with the raw and murky things you’ve been carrying, and in these lightless labors, you are slowly becoming whole. As Jarod K. Anderson writes in a poetic excerpt from Love Notes From The Hollow Tree, “The work to bring a violet up into the light happens down in the dark.” Grief moth is the flinty grey umbral amber, fog-faded forest of ghostly trees in your interior landscape where this work takes place.

Rich, earthy and slightly bitter balsam and leathery-green oakmoss lend some glam-gorgeous 70’s chypre vibes to a dusty, crumbling dinosaur vertebrae propped on an ancient piece of driftwood in a vast warehouse of musty arcane books and bones.

Within every collection the Lab creates, there’s always that one scent that seems perfectly quaffable, so delightfully juicy and spirited and effervescent , that no one would blame you or think you’d taken leave of your senses if you just tipped the bottle past your lips and downed the whole thing in one gulp. Of course, let’s please not do that and I am definitely not suggesting it! I would, however, suggest conjuring a cocktail inspired by this fragrance, an ineffable tipple of our own devising: a libation citrusy and bright, with an undercurrent of something earthy and bitter and strange. Do patchouli bitters exist? Maybe patchouli syrup? An Aperol Spritz with a smallest dropper drip of dank, and perhaps mythical, patchouli bitters.

A soapy, creamy white floral musk paired with the vaporous ghost of a charcoal briquette ; the soft scent of summer’s wilting gardenia blossoms against the vast and vaulted cloudless, cerulean cathedral of an August afternoon sky, while you wait for the hurricane to hit. A moment’s glimpse of an endless heaven…before all hell breaks loose.

When I first sniffed this, I caught notes of coffee, milk chocolate, and the cozy comfort of warm, worn-in robes? But today it smells of a delicate porcelain cup of black tea brightened with a spritz of lemon, warming and softening the embossed tooling of the old leather book it is perched upon. Those wily Satanists! I can’t quite get a fix on them, but it’s a wonderful scent, either way.

There’s a quote that is used frequently as people’s Twitter bios: “though she be but little, she is fierce!” and I regret to inform you that until just now, I had no idea that is taken from some dialogue in a Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I’m not as well-versed in my Shakespeare as I ought to be and anyway, that’s not my point. Anathema Device smells like a fierce, little creature: a teeny-tiny, big-eyed anime blackcurrant wearing comedically large cyborg boxing gloves. This is a pulpy, juicy beatdown of a berry scent, strengthened by a vaguely metallic backbone, powered by a syrupy amber core.

There’s a scent, or the dreamy memory of a scent, that I really love and I feel like I may have mentioned it before. A sort of plastic-y, vanilla scent, like maybe if you buried your nose in your 1980’s Strawberry Shortcake doll’s synthetic hair and just huffed that strangely pretty childhood fragrance for a moment or two. Imagine if you crossed that memory with a pocketful of lemon candies and a wisp of Antique Lace. Now that I think about it, if you’re bummed that Antique Lace is no longer available, I think Sister Mary Loquacious has got a similar feel and would make a lovely substitute.

A storm, gathering on the horizon all afternoon has with boom and bluster, announced its arrival, as torrential rain begins to rattle and splatter against the windows. Placing a clean, earthenware pitcher in the far corner of your darkened kitchen, you watch a slow trickle, drop by drop, suspend and fall with an inaudible swish and a soft clink from that rotted, sagging spot on your roof. These cold droplets smell chilled, earthy, and electric. As a shriek of lightning splits the sky in two, you inhale the comforting scent of yeast rolls browning in the oven. They only have a few minutes left on the timer; you send a small hope skyward that they finish baking before the power goes out. Slate Black Clouds Tumbled Over Eden, interestingly, smells like all of these things.

A startled apple tree awoke in a rainforest, and surprisingly, flowered and flourished far from its midwestern orchard home amongst the lush, humid jungle vegetation; or, a few ripe apple slices hidden in the midst of a tropical fruit platter, touched on one side by tart pineapple, the other by jammy guava.

I can’t reconcile myself to these notes but what I can tell you is that it smells like being fifteen and skinny dipping in your boyfriend’s grandparent’s swimming pool when they’re out of town for the summer and it’s a blistering hot day, with the tose-tickling scent of chloramine, concrete hot enough to barbeque teenage feet, and the wisp of spicy-oak mossy-lavender Drakkar Noir in the air. I don’t think any of these are unpleasant smells (I actually still love Drakkar Noir and that’s totally what I am going to name my Norwegian Ridgeback one day.) Anyway, this scent conjures fun memories for m

Wet, just out of the bottle, there is something about Mr. Czernobog that tugs at the edges of memory. A sweet, spicy heat, but tempered by a child-like treat. Milk and grains. Soupy cinnamon oatmeal, or a forbidden breakfast cereal like Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Or…no! I have it. Little Debbie Pecan Pinwheels. Once applied to skin, however, that strange, wonderful association fades as a mentholated, metallic aspect momentarily asserts itself. From there it becomes an iron tooth lost amidst coniferous detritus underfoot.