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 is 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. But now, the mystery is over: we have found our guy.
A Legacy of Anonymity
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 had 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.
The Sound of Dissolution
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 is something intoxicating about not knowing what you are 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.
False LP A: A Deep Dive
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 is 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 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 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 is 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. It has been used productively by artists like Biosphere and Jake Muir. 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 does not 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.