Green Carnation

Did You Know?

• Green Carnation's 60-minute single-track album Light of Day, Day of Darkness is one of the longest single songs in metal.
• The band's 2007 live DVD A Night Under the Dam was recorded under a 30-meter-tall dam in the Norwegian mountains.
• Stein Roger Sordal made his debut as lead vocalist on the 2005 EP The Burden Is Mine... Alone, writing and performing the title track entirely by himself.
• The trilogy A Dark Poem was inspired by the poem 'Ophelia' by French symbolism poet Arthur Rimbaud.
• The band recorded three albums simultaneously in 2024, working off a concept formed in the 2000s.

History

Green Carnation was the brainchild of Terje Vik Schei, known as Tchort, who started the band before he became Emperor's bassist in 1990. The group eventually fell apart, and its remaining members—X-Botteri, Cm:Botteri, and Anders Kobro—went on to form In the Woods... The debut album, Journey to the End of the Night, came out in 2000 on Prophecy Productions, a folk-inspired doom metal record recorded the year before. After that, the Botteri brothers, Alf Tore Rasmussen, and Geir Solli all departed. Kobro then teamed up with Tchort, and for nearly two years they worked out the basic structure of what would become Light of Day, Day of Darkness, a single 60-minute progressive metal track and one of metal's longest songs. A pre-production session with Tchort on guitar, Kobro on drums, and Endre Kirkesola on bass convinced In the Woods... guitarist Bjørn Harstad to join for the final recording, alongside bassist Stein Roger Sordal, vocalist Kjetil Nordhus, and keyboardist Bernt Moen of Shining. That album hit stores in 2001 via Prophecy in Europe and The End Records in the US. The 2003 follow-up, A Blessing in Disguise, came out on Season Of Mist and mixed progressive metal and rock with gothic and hard rock touches, with lyrics rooted in Sordal's difficult childhood. Harstad left after that album due to other commitments, and Moen also stepped away following the 2003 tour to focus on other projects.