After the attention that Wardruna deserve to get deeply into the genre, it’s due to mention in an exemplary manner other three musical projects regarding nordic folk, each of one with its own peculiarity; the Swedish Forndom and Ulf Söderberg and the Danish Danheim.

Let’s start with Forndom, probably because their project has a similar character to the works of Einar “Kvitrafn” Selvik and the sounds closer to Wardruna.
Forndom is the nickname of the Swedish multi-instrumentalist Ludvig Swärd who started the activity on 2012. Before that, Ludvig managed an amateur photography blog, in fact his first recording was a 5 tracks EP published on 2014 called “Flykt”, it’s been created for his photo blog as sound accompaniment. Following the success of the EP which had good reviews, Ludvig decided to expand his talent into the musical world; his first album called “Dauðra Dura” came out two years after the “Flykt”, it’s an absolute and wonderful masterpiece with intense and dark sounds, very similar to Wardruna atmosphere. Just like them, Ludvig used acoustic instruments for this recording and because of this the listening is more involving. “Svitjod” is the track number five and it’s the highest point, we recommend it because it’s a journey into a pure Viking dimension, however all the seven tracks of this album are terrific, the music is incredibly deep and touching, it goes straight to the emotion! It has to be listen to with particular attention.

Following the path towards the nordic folk’s world, we’ll meet a Sweden musician and record producer called Ulf Söderberg who started his carrier on the end of the 80’s singing a kind of disco/pop music. On 1995, after few years of silence, he showed up again looking completely different and played a different genre and his first new type of album is called “Nattljus” which includes 11 well done electronic dark tracks with flashes of dark ambient and strong tribal references. In this album there’s little nordic folk to listen to, but you can already get the mark on Ulf’s music, fully performed by keyboards and samples and steeped in rhythmic which recalls the glorious pagan rituals. It’s not about the first work we want to talk about though, but the second one, the album “Tidvatten” which is his masterpiece dated 1998. It has 10 tracks which help to clarify the direction to be taken that is definitely clearer and it’s both interesting and unusual from the point of view of listening, in fact the big different compared to “Nattljus” is that in “Tidvatten” there’s an inclusion of a little nordic folk, even though it’s not Ulf’s principal genre; the album features the electronic dark and the dark ambient (two genres we’re going to examine in the future) together with a number of tribal rhythmics, but he switches between these last elements and a sophisticated and purely evocative nordic folk. It’s perceived in the fantastic, beautiful and deep “I Vargmånens Tid” or in “Tidvatten part I”, this track will be back at the end of the second part of the album and will complete the entire journey switching in a natural way between the nordic folk and the dark ambient.

“Tidvatten” is an outstanding, dark, gloomy, magic album, it’s full of nuances, because the nordic folk, in this case, it’s not the only genre on the album and that makes the difference with the other artists already mentioned. The acoustic instrumentation has used very little, music is almost entirely electronically made and the tribal part enlivens the rhythmic part compared to a more intimate interpretation that we can perceived in Wardruna and Forndom works.