Artist: Nortt
Title: Dødssang
Type: Album
Label: Avantgarde
A little history for context. Back around 1992-1994 there were a handful of bands playing in the darkness, creating from death and black metal what would become known as funeral doom. Thergothon, Evoken and the still peerless Skepticism being the highlights for me. Bear in mind with little internet and no social media this was a genre so far undergound that even the shoggoths were unaware of the movement. In 2003 a curiosity album named Gudsforladt by an entity named Nortt appeared. With black metal aesthetics to a degree and a sharp edge to the slow, slow riffs I had no concept of what this was when I heard it. But it’s fair to say it drastically changed my musical landscape forever. It led me on divergent paths into noise, doom (the proper traditional stuff) and to finally pierce the gloom of funeral doom (via, I think, Until Death Overtakes Me and then onto those three mentioned above).
So yeah, Nortt are important to me. And this unexpected revenant after eight years of fading echoes even more so. Even though the entity Norrt may be shrouded, the subject of this album is not. Each title relates to death, emptiness, the end. Dust and cobwebs. Darkness and fading.
Slow keyboards, some indistinct spoken word deep in the darkness. A warning? A welcome? Simply a statement? Who knows. We are then coaxed onwards by drone, ponderous riff and the slow, simple voice of a piano. Growled, seemingly burdened vocals crawl from the darkness raising hairs with each step.
This is quite all enveloping in it’s bleakness. This is indeed Nortt.
There is such beauty here, make no mistake. The simple but extraordinary sombre piano melodies with the woven keyboards, the slow push of the riff and the aching voice are like robed, obscured guides through an ancient necropolis. Perhaps each track raises a spirit from the tombs we pass to whisper memories or to impart warnings. Perhaps they want to be known and to be remembered as people. But together in this haunted, spectral journey they become landmarks along the journey toward being extinguished.
There is a graceful motion to this album, dusty hems of thick robes whispering across flagstones long left untouched by steps. There is no light and yet somehow it allows you sight, drawing out shapes from the shadows and allowing them to impinge upon our world just long enough, just barely enough to register.
The strangeness is that for all the chill atmosphere, all the slow procession through the tombscape, there is a strange, eerie sense of humanity for me me. Something that we all shall share drawn out so that we can reflect and instead of the frantic fear of the inevitable we are allowed a glimpse at the strange grace that this journey possesses. It is mesmeric and yes there is a certain welcome afforded. Even if the journey is not yet for us, this harbinger bring not simply a doom upon us, but also a promise that the world of the dead is still a world. Dust is the grass, shadows the light. Flickering dying candles the sun. Sumptuous in its austerity and slow waltz, this is without doubt the best funeral doom I have heard since ‘Companion’.
Tomb keeper, mausoleum haunter, whisperer of knowledge and the inevitable factor at the end of existence; Nortt was, is and shall always be here.
Amen.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 