The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco—where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow—caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where Topdown Dialectic was based, or how many people it was, or if people were even making the music, instead of algorithms or bots. (Past press materials have referred to the project as “electronic designs” made using “software strategies,” and more than once I’ve been told by people in the know: “Topdown Dialectic is a process.”) But now the 20,000 r/TheOverload followers who couldn’t sleep at night can rest easy: We found our guy.
For those not in the know, Topdown Dialectic was originally a faceless project putting out clear cassettes of washed-out dub techno in clear cases with absolutely no packaging or info. The tracks were all exactly five minutes long, which lent further mystery, as if they’d been produced by some arcane assembly line. As the project evolved, it broke off from the Aught collective, eventually landing on Brian Foote’s Peak Oil label, where Topdown Dialectic became a (relative) hot commodity. The records sold out in a matter of days, and nerdy online chatter escalated with each repress.
And why did people care so much? Because, like the presentation, the music said as much as it didn’t say. Topdown Dialectic tracks are like film negatives exposed to light for a split second: murky and hard to place, with once-familiar shapes bled out into blobs. You might get the occasional techno beat, chord stab, or even vocal sample. There’s something intoxicating about not knowing what you’re listening to, about only catching snippets of familiar sounds, like branches and leaves caught in river rapids. The new LP takes that sense of dissolution to a whole new level, more impressionistic and bewitching than before, with barely there rhythms that randomly surface and disappear.
This lengthy 2xLP blends archival material, recorded between 2013 and 2016, with more recent cuts. Despite its grab-bag approach, False LP A follows the trend of each Topdown release being weirder and more reduced than the last. Those looking for leftfield techno bangers might be disappointed with the opener, which feels ghostly and dissipated even by Topdown standards. Every once in a while a crow calls, but there’s not much structure to it, with the sounds listlessly bouncing off the walls imposed by the five-minute runtimes instead of cohering into a rhythm.
As False LP A lumbers to life, more things happen: On “03,” huge basslines offer a reminder of the project’s origins in kinda-sorta dance music. “05” is deconstructed dub techno, as vocal sounds gasp and burp in the midst of all the washed-out digital detritus, and on “10,” a string melody that sounds a whole lot like Pépé Bradock’s “Deep Burnt” wanders into the fuzzy frame. The little bit of slap bass from Vol. 2 makes an incredibly brief appearance on “12,” and the way the rhythm repeats on “11” reminds me of a basketball being dribbled in slow motion. The slightest details, or the smallest bits of structure, are what stick out—what can feel like an amorphous ooze of nothingness suddenly snaps into place thanks to a rhythmic rattle or jagged vocal sample. It’s almost like a game: a Where’s Waldo for recognizable sounds in an otherwise slippery sonic ecosystem.
The shimmering, loopy textures are similar to vaporwave, but Topdown Dialectic also reminds me of Akira Rabelais, who designed an arcane sampler called the Argeïphontes Lyre, which takes in media and spits out something ghostly that bears almost no resemblance to to the original, with cryptic settings you can turn up or down to equally mysterious effect. It’s been used productively by artists like Biosphere and Jake Muir, though it also has a way of flattening music. But False LP A feels thrillingly three-dimensional, with rough edges and a deeply physical sound. For a genre that feeds off formula and precedent, Topdown Dialectic is a breath of fresh air because it doesn’t really sound like anything else out there, except perhaps for the enigmatic entity known as False Aralia, which—spoiler alert—is also Schlossman, who is swiftly becoming one of electronic music’s most distinctive and original producers.
