Brother Night
Eau de Parfum, Apoteker Tepe (2016)

A near-perfect representation of the notes and brief. This does indeed smell like the ambience of Día de Muertos in Central Mexico: burning copal throwing its dense and sickly sweet fog of smoke for hundreds of meters in every direction or worse, choking the conditions of possibility for "fresh air" from any enclosed space, rank and fetid cempasúchiles, rotting in stale water in their vases. That is it, folks. That's what Brother Night smells like. Utterly evocative and authentic to its purpose.

No one in their right mind would wear this as a perfume: it strips the context, meaning, and ultimately, the liberatory ephemerality from the annual honoring of the souls of the dead. Their presence would be too strong and overwhelming for us to encounter and bear daily—ours, too insolent and insipid for them.

The first sniff I took of Brother Night made me recoil in surprise. I was instantly taken back to memories I had of sitting around campfires with friends or family during camping trips with the extremely pungent smell of wood smoke filling the air around us, inflected by the smells of the trees, grass, and wildflowers of our surroundings. It was instantly evocative and alluring, but that's my own personal reaction. For those without memories like that to call back to, this could actually be a difficult perfume to take.

The smoke in Brother Night is very real, and very intense; you are going to smell like you've been around a campfire. Filling in the gaps of the smoke are beautiful, sweet, yellow florals of marigolds, and sticky, resinous olibanum. The balance of these accords is spot on. The smoke is so pungent that it would be very easy for it to lead this perfume into a deep gray and black mess, but the levity of the marigold and olibanum help ensure a lightness of being. Interestingly, AT refers to the smoke, florals, and resins as "disjunction" - meaning that are supposed to be like oil and water, never mixing and standing apart from each other. In a sense, I can smell how they are disjointed in that the three don't easily overlap in any particular places to create a feeling of seamlessness, but, most importantly, they don't grate against each other either. The disjunction is not alarming at all. Though they may never truly be hand-in-hand in any part of the perfume, they are shoulder to shoulder and present a unified front that works very well. I'm reminded of a key principle of the culinary arts most frequently displayed in East Asian cooking: a truly great dish must have a balance of savory, spicy, bitter, sweet, and acidic. Western culinary styles are lot less stringent in adhering to this principle, and probably disregard it more often than not, but name a classic East Asian dish and it's a classic because it adheres to this principle and nails the balance. This is Brother Night.

It's also served well by Holladay Saltz's unique style of keeping the whole of the perfume light weight and breathable. But therein lies its weak point too. AT's perfumes are colognes that have the longevity and actions of a cologne but are stated as EdPs and priced like them too. I can't help but think that such a bold statement like Brother Night would have a more impressive impact if the statement was made a bit more confidently - louder and longer. Brother Night is going to test some wearer's tastes just by its accords, and since that's the case what's the point of being shy and meek.... Nonetheless, quite good and memorable.

Marigold, Smoke, Resin. My fav of the Apoteker Tepe's ive tried out of the discovery kit

My first Marigold floral and possibly my new favorite floral facet ever. Previously a "lavender only and maybe a little rose sometimes" kind of person although I do love many flowers in my garden i do not always want to smell like them; I don't usually like florals d/t the overabundance of nasty syrupy synthetic florals out there. This is sharp, spicy, and a dark delight to anyone with a personal relationship to this orange flower.

This perfume is the olfactory equivalent to stringing up yards of marigold garlands while burning holy resins on coal. Filing this next to Wild Veil Perfume's "Catacombs" under "perfumes I put on before bed to prepare my corpse for the grave". Autumn/Winter and for ritual use /languishing only. I would not wear this to the office or around other people outside of my sanctuary (apartment). 11/10 i wish i could source/afford a whole bottle of this. might mess around and become a perfumer just to create my own resinous marigold homage