David Seth Moltz

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Training and career

Moltz grew up in New England between ocean and forest, in a house where his father played classical, blues and rock at volume. He formed bands from childhood, including a grade-school outfit that attempted death metal on toy instruments. His first encounter with fragrance was incidental and he tells it himself: a bottle of cologne won at summer camp.

He enrolled at Boston University to study film, taking history courses alongside, and skipped much of the final stretch to tour with his band. In 2002 he moved to New York with his bandmates to keep the music going. He played in several groups, some of them signed and touring, none of them commercially successful. The press record does not name those bands consistently, so this entry does not name them either.

Perfumery arrived sideways in the mid 2000s, in a Brooklyn where everyone was making something. He met Kavi Ahuja, trained as an architect, while working in a restaurant. The two started collecting Victorian beauty manuals from secondhand bookshops, bought a still, distilled their own citrus oils and made tonics and scents to give away. Kavi proposed turning it into a business: she printed labels at her architecture firm, he made everything by hand. D.S. & Durga came out of that in 2007, in a Bushwick apartment. The name joins his initials to his pet name for her.

Approach and method

Moltz is a self-taught perfumer in the literal sense, and he states it plainly: nearly everything he knows about fragrance he gleaned from old books, from experimentation and from untutored curiosity. His apprenticeship consisted of hours of trials with every result written down, until he understood how aromatic materials behave against one another. There is no curriculum in his past, no mentor, no supplier laboratory.

His method starts from story as often as from material, and he says he works in both directions depending on the project. He keeps a running list of names and stories on his phone and turns one into a formula when the idea and the accord meet. Bowmakers began with a nineteenth-century violin workshop and was built from violin varnish, mahogany, aged walnut and pine rosin. The fragrance does not illustrate the story; it is the story in odor form.

The comparison with music is structural rather than decorative. He likens material selection to a painter leaving space so each note stays audible, and argues he can say as much in a perfume as in a book, a painting or a song. Every release ships with a text and a playlist, which is that conviction made literal.

Activities

Composition is not the whole job. He runs the creative side of the house with Kavi Ahuja Moltz, who handles architecture, bottle design and visual identity, and he stays close to manufacturing: production is kept in New York, which he defends as a small cottage-industry principle rather than as a selling point. He works with established sourcing partners who can find rare materials and document their history.

The catalog has widened over the years into scented candles, home lines and objects, without changing hands: the house has never credited another nose. After an investor took a stake in the business, the couple kept creative and artistic control of the whole.

Signature perfumes

Nine reference compositions from D.S. & Durga, regularly cited by the trade press. Unless noted otherwise, the house credits David Seth Moltz as the sole author of its catalog.

Olfactory signature

Moltz writes with documentary sharpness. He does not chase blending: his accords keep each material identifiable, even at the cost of sounding abrupt on first contact. The prairie greenness of Cowboy Grass, the birch tar of Burning Barbershop, the varnish and dry wood of Bowmakers, the fig of Debaser, the wet eucalyptus of Big Sur After Rain. In each case one or two materials hold the front and everything else holds the light. This is perfumery of legibility rather than of depth of accord.

The second trait is that the subject nearly always precedes the formula. Where a large house starts from a positioning brief, he starts from a place, a date or a song, and accepts the composition only once that subject is recognizable. This is why the catalog looks heterogeneous, running from the driest green to the sweetest lactonic, and why there is no olfactory saga: each bottle is a standalone short story, not a chapter.

Key characteristics

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