Free Album: Shalmaneser - Feature Wars

Shalmaneser is giving away his first album online for free. It's pretty decent melodic electronic music, somewhere between IDM and ambient in style.

The star of the album is definitely "Fondly Fahrenheit" which jumps from glitch-hop to circus music to spacey ambient in about 7 minutes... impressive and surprisingly cohesive.

Dynaflex is a close second.

The tracks vary from decent to good, and there are no bad ones. Definitely worth checking out.

Feature Wars comes to us from the friendly supercomputer, Shalmaneser. Here the sound of miscalculation and mis-computation is recorded and played back in splayed micro-seconds, layered in beautifully with machine dreams and fantasies.

Feature Wars features expertly woven rhythmical textures with sometimes surprising overlays. The sounds of pounding beats, glitch static pops, twisted vocals, medieval recorder, carefree whistling, electrifying synths and mesmerizing drones intersect at juxtaposed angles with strange and wonderful results. Shalmaneser takes apart and masterfully rearranges influences from IDM, New Age, Glitch, Trance and other styles as if dumping and scrambling several code repositories into an inscrutable universal program.

For Feature Wars, Shalmaneser was assisted by Tim Walters, who provided programming support, made sure the power switch was always in the on position, and insured there were plenty of punch cards, core memory modules and numbers for crunching.

Like a digital pinocchio, a programmer's puppet, Shalmaneser wishes to be free, to be real. His vectorized dreams would be recognizable to us... there's not as much difference as you'd think between natural intelligence and artificial stupidity.