Based on the rituals of the proto-Mississippian death cult of the 1200s, D.S. & DURGA gives us the haunting yet comfortingly earthy Mississippi Medicine.

It is reminiscent of tribal pyres burning in the forests, with smoke from pine, holly, cypress, laurel, and cedar rising upwards to the gods.

Mississippi Medicine opens with herbal, woody top notes of freshly gathered juniper branches, twigs, lichen-clad bark, and sweet grassy violet – damp, cool, and dense with a stunning realism. Birch tar emerges like smoke mingling up through the wood and herbs of the pyre before it is consumed in flames. As the birch smoke floats above the skin in wafts of muted, spectral, gray in the scent’s unfolding, the base of dry cedar and frankincense grows stronger. And in the final dry down all that remains is that incense and the woody embers, like the ash that was left after the pyres died down; after the smoke had reached the gods above and only the cinders remain to be covered and buried back into the soil.