At War with Self

Albums

The project's first album, Torn Between Dimensions (2005), was created by Glenn Snelwar with drummer Mark Zonder and bassist Michael Manring. This instrumental trio produced compositions that blend progressive rock, metal, jazz, ambient, and classical styles, often within individual tracks. The album received critical acclaim and has grown a following through word of mouth. For the second release, Acts of God (2007), Snelwar aimed to change nearly every aspect of the project while keeping its core mission of combining disparate styles without boundaries. The duo of Snelwar (guitars, mandolin, synths) and Damon Trotta (bass, vocals, synths, programming) was joined by Sluggo's Goon Music labelmates including James Von Buelow (guitars), Steve Decker (drums), Mark Sunshine (vocals), Dave Archer (keyboards), and Manfred Dikkers (drums). The third chapter, A Familiar Path (2009), returned to Snelwar's roots, fully realizing his original concept of blending classical guitars with progressive and thrash metal. This incarnation featured Manfred Dikkers on drums and percussion. Snelwar described the tracks as the heaviest, most aggressive, and most accurate version of his vision for combining metal and progressive influences with classical guitars. The album includes instrumental pieces such as a hybrid half-classical, half-metal rendition of a Heitor Villa-Lobos guitar study, the Slayer-meets-King Crimson aggression of Concrete and Poison and Diseased State, a new rendering of Reflections (originally from the Gordian Knot debut), and the guitar shred of The Ether Trail, balanced by the vocal-centered title track and Ourselves. The artwork completes the emotion and intensity of the 42-minute disc. For the recording of the untitled fifth album, drummer Alex Arellano was invited; Marco Minnemann plays drums on Circadian Rhythm Disorder (2015), which is another version of Minnemann's drum solo project Normalizer 2.