Sweden’s Arckanum have been ploughing their particular black metal furrow for over twenty years now so the arrival of a new album gets greeted with something akin to a shrug of the shoulders rather than a sharp intake of breath such is the short attention span of many a music fan these days. The old adage that there is a thin line between genius and madness has often been stretched to and beyond its accepted limits by Arckanum and their eccentric, single minded leader Johan “Shamaate” Lahger, an artist who varies his time between this project and writing books about witchcraft, runic tradition and chaos-gnosticism.Continue reading →