In the previous article, we talked a little about the funeral doom saying how extremely strange and dark is this subgenre of metal. Now, let’s go deeper by talking about a prominent, superb exceptional performer.

Our first acquaintance with funeral doom goes back to 2010… we got an advertising flyer of the German record label called Cyclone Empire which promoted the reprint of “Gudsforladt”, a pure depressive black funeral doom metal…
Whaaaaaaaat??? What a fuck is this stuff?
We thought straight away to another useless trick in order to sell through advertising a range of mad metal genre put together, so at the moment, we didn’t pay attention, really. Few days later though, we read the title of the album “Gudsforladt” again, because the advertising flyer came to hand and we simply decided to listen to it, only because we liked the sound of this word… but, whose album is this? It’s of somebody called Nortt… Never heard about him before.
Since the beginning, we kept totally silence and transported into a world of heavy, gloomy and dark atmosphere, far different from what we used to listen to till then; we understood it wasn’t a bullshit, actually, we found ourselves with something new, a new way to express grief, despair, death.
That’s right, it’s death we felt listening to this work and we immediately bought the CD; on the back of it, we read what was written in the advertising flyer of the Cyclone Empire, a pure depressive black funeral doom metal… Nortt described his music just like that and still does it, he’s the mind behind all this.

But, who’s Nortt?
We’re talking about the late 1995, Odense in Denmark… he’s a boy people know nothing about, even the name, but he gave life to a project called Nortt, like his own stage name. After only two years, he produced a demo by himself called “Nattetale”, limited to 100 copies, a raw, cold black metal with pretty slow rhythm but well off the funeral doom to which he will focus in the future.

The switch happened in 1998 with the next work titled “Døden…” and he himself explained that this demo was created spending all days in cemeteries and feeling extremely inspired; it’s clear that he undertook a music line that made him spokesperson of a message directly from the world of the dead.
In 1999 he produced another demo called “Graven” with materials he’d written thanks to the air breathed in the cemeteries and the feeling felt with the dead’ souls and this was a well-established basis for his masterpiece he was going to create and to record after few years.
The three demos are self-released; cheap recordings and lean sounds (except for “Graven” which has a better recording), the artist himself reported to be unhappy with them, in our opinion though, they’ve got good concepts which Nortt would have taken up in the future to give them a proper processing.

The first period dedicated at the demos was followed by a recording deal, so in 2002, Nortt could produced an EP called “Hedengang”; it’s right in this one we started to listen to the real sound the artist wanted to express. The EP is only limited to 350 copies till today and it has been only produced on record 7”, it’s one of the most difficult part of the discography to obtain. The quality is far higher compared to his demos, vocals are also more defined and there even are good keyboards arrangements; the funeral doom metal productions have always intentionally been shoddy to recreate the typical dark and crumbling atmosphere and in “Hedengang” the mood is not affected at all even though the quality is better. Definitely a good work, it was a great notice of what would follow, which is “Gudsforladt”, even more qualitatively superior and definitely more devastating and bleaker compared to the EP… doubtless the highest point of Nortt’s whole discography.