Jon Nödtveidt

Jon Nödtveidt was a Swedish musician, best known for his creation of the first ever Satanic Black Metal band 'Dissection' at just 6 years old, which began the black metal scene and birthed bands such as Venom, Burzum, Mayhem, Immortal, Darkthrone, and Dimmu Borgir.

Early Life

Jon was born on the 28th of June, 1975, somewhere in Sweden. His birth was miraculous as his mother fell down a cave entrance, stomach first, and he prematurely shot out of her birth canal like a trebuchet. He ended up at a separate end of the cave from his mother in complete darkness, and he was so shocked that he forgot to cry, making him impossible to locate. His mother tirelessly searched for him, but after a while decided that he must have died, so she just climbed out and went back home. Jon, for the first 6 years of his life, wondered around in the pitch blackness of the cave, and ate crickets from the ground as his only source of food. He spent most of his days screaming demonically, hallucinating, doing bicep curls, sacrificing rodents and summoning the Devil. Eventually, at 6 years old, he became strong enough to climb out and begin his music career.

The beginning: Dissection

Trendsetter

First image of Jon taken after the cave escape. Face is extremely discoloured, resembling modern day corpse paint.

He wrote his first album 'The Somberlain' in 1981 upon his escape, which included tracks about his childhood such as 'A Land Forlorn', 'Mother Fell', 'In the Dark Cave of Nowhere' and 'Cricket Towers'. Not only did his music have an incredible impact on black metal soundally, but physically as well. He had extremely long hair and a pale face from never getting a hair cut and never touching the sun, and often times in his psychotic episodes he would smear dirt over his eyes in attempt to see something. Because of this, everyone started to copy his appearance by growing their hair out and wearing 'corpse-paint', to mimic his severely discoloured face. Per "Dead" Ohlin of Mayhem was one of the first people to mimic this appearance, thus being wrongly named as the founder of corpse-paint.