Angst

[doomsday_disco]

Copoiba balsam and sour rhubarb churning with fir needle, blackcurrant bud, red grapefruit, red ginger, pepperwood, and olibanum.

 

 

Edvard Munch

[bheansidhe]

This is not at all angsty; it's a rather peppery, pithy grapefruit and red ginger (more rooty and spicy than the white kind?) with sweet, bracing fir needle and rhubarb, anchored by some kind of tree bark. I'm never quite sure what balsam is supposed to smell like, so I can't tell you if that note dominates. 

 

There's a particular patch of forest I hike in central Oregon where the air smells of fir needle, and that's definitely the conifer here - not pine or pine freshener. 

 

As it dries, it turns into an achingly gourmet, small-batch rhubarb ginger ale - the kind you put into a $25 cocktail being served somewhere foody. (Now that I think of it, I need to try brewing a rhubarb ginger ale.) The final drydown is gently woodsy.

 

So much more cheerful than the painting, but I'm not mad about it. 

Edited May 28 by bheansidhe

[ghoulnextdoor]

Psychic shockwaves of cognitive estrangement - what demented pleasure to recognize beloved scents transformed into their shadow selves. Of the two wolves inside me, this delights the freak who admires a perfumer capable of subverting grapefruit and ginger so thoroughly. Grapefruit distilled to its most accusatory elements; ginger gone a bit septic, medicinal rather than spiced. The feverish chaos of sickness made olfactory, an eerie parade of familiar notes whose expressions now exude subtle paranoia, discomfort, distrust. The landscape of unease settles: coniferous shadows lean too close, fruit-sour brightness concentrated to vinegar and bitter quinine, the delirium and dread of existence seeping through pores like chilled and electric, frantic fever sweat. It dries softer, and tangier and fizzier; a jittery-prickly rose-gold ruby panic shrub.

Edited Friday at 02:25 PM by ghoulnextdoor