Winternights

Hay has been cured on wooden poles for millennia.

Tungsinn is the Scandinavian word for the melancholy that long winters and dwindling light produce, and the release sits inside it, on the old harvest festival that marked summer's passing. Swedish farmers raise the hay on poles to lift it toward the light and keep it out of the moisture of the earth. The hay glows like spun gold against a darkening year. Jute and holy grass run thin and dry over it. Barley and deer's tongue thicken it. Cade and labdanum bring the smoke and the resin, and honey and benzoin hold the sweetness in. The consolation runs in summer and autumn as much as in the depth of winter.

Scent Trunk commissions its fragrances one at a time from independent noses working across the world, and prints their names on the page beside the work. It looks for cultural heterogeneity and industry experience, and works with the self-taught as readily as the academically trained, the bootstrapping entrepreneur as readily as the corporate nose. Each year it also picks unconventional noses, chefs or writers or musicians with an exceptional creative streak.

Most releases name one material as their focus and one place as their provenance, and each carries a signed passage in which the person who made it says what they were after. Winternights is hay cured on Swedish poles. Tears and Smiles is pineapple cake and oolong in Taiwan. Stroopwafel is a canal house in Amsterdam with tulips on the table. The material and the place come first, and the writing follows them.