TOPDOWN DIALECTIC - False LP A

Destined for the dub techno pantheon alongside Basic Channel and Monolake, the mysterious artist known as Topdown Dialectic arrives at his first work stripped of all anonymity: behind the moniker lies Izaak Schlossman, photographer and veteran of experimental electronics, based in San Francisco. The project was born in the early 2010s and has since followed shadowy trajectories, with a curiosity that never reached the hysterical levels of who is Burial? but still left plenty of questions about what goes on behind the scenes. At its core lies a sentient ecosystem, a machine that lives on its own terms rather than reducing hardware to a lifeless tool: a device that generates sound by itself, feedback loops and processing chains that self-modulate, left to run with the margin of error that only glitch can subvert.

Rather than rehashing yet another dub chord, his is a deconstruction of the canon: the systems are non-linear, constantly mutating and reacting to internal changes, like an emotional tangle of thoughts only seemingly scrambled. The method, according to the artist, fractalizes bass music frequencies by working through suggestion. A logic that first shows up in the choice of material, organic and crackling: record collections, field recordings and hiss merge into a single amalgam with what were once voices, drums, crumbled chords. The principle is to capture and edit, as the project's very name suggests, and it translates into an iron-clad rule: every track lasts exactly five minutes, the trademark of the entire discography.

It's a substance that lives on echoes of a Jan Jelinek darkened by the echoes of Rhythm & Sound, of a hypnagogia that reaps the fruits of Actress. Through expanded algorithms, the looped elements become intelligible, contracting and echoing, floundering in the mud as if they couldn't do otherwise. Dense and deep, the record draws on sessions from ten years ago, resurfaced and remixed with yesterday's material, and sounds consistent with the direction of an artist who has become a godfather of the new ambient dub scene. Gone is the angular trigonometry of early electronic music, and gone too is the sidereal brutalism of the most cybernetic techno, replaced by a soft flow, like a remote archive that installs itself in the human body and blends in as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The double LP flows like an aquatic breath, where hazy rhythmic phrases and dub harmonies in shades of grey materialize and dissolve. The reference points are those of a Chain Reaction shattered into fragments, of a Demdike Stare rendered agnostic, or again of a Vladislav Delay passed through filters of leaden opacity, one that has, not by chance, spawned its own school of followers, with Paperclip Minimiser foremost among them. The movement is unpredictable and granular, minimal and saturated in the same gesture, and its circularity expresses itself through asymmetries: the individual instruments seem to travel on separate channels, meeting at intervals to close off lopsided phrases, in a slippery organism where time stops running in just one direction.

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22/07/2026