Destined for the Olympus of dub techno like Basic Channel and Monolake, the unknown artist known as Topdown Dialectic arrives at his first work stripped of any anonymous guise: behind the moniker hides Izaak Schlossman, photographer and veteran of experimental electronics, based in San Francisco. The project was born in the early 1910s and since then had followed shadowy trajectories, with a curiosity that did not reach the hysterical levels of who is Burial? but it left open doubts about behind the scenes. At the base there is a sentient ecosystem, a machine that lives on its own, instead of reducing thehardware a lifeless instrument: a device that generates sound by itself, feedback and processing chains that self-modulate, left to run with the margin of error that only the glitch can subvert.
Rather than taking up yet another dub chord, his is a deconstruction of the canon: the systems are not linear, they constantly change and react to internal changes, like an emotional tangle of thoughts that are only apparently disjointed. The method, according to the author, fractalizes the frequencies of bass music working by suggestion. A logic that falls first and foremost in the choice of material, organic and crackling: record collections, field recordings and hisses become a unique amalgam with what were once voices, drums, crumbled chords. The principle is to capture and edit, as the name of the project suggests, and translates into an iron constraint: all the tracks last exactly five minutes, a trademark of the entire discography.
It is a substance that lives on references to a Jan Jelinek blackened by the echoes of Rhythm & Sound, to a hypnagogia that reaps the fruits of Actress. Through expanded algorithms, the elements in loops they become intelligible, contract and echo, floundering in the mud as if they couldn't do otherwise. Dense and profound, the album draws from sessions from ten years ago, resurfaced and remixed with yesterday's material, and sounds consistent with the direction of the person who has become the godfather of the new ambient dub scene. No longer the angular trigonometry of the first electronics, nor the sidereal brutalism of the most cybernetic techno, but a soft flow, like a remote archive that is installed in the human body and mixes with it as if it were the most natural thing.
The double LP flows like a watery breath, where misty rhythmic phrases and grayscale dub harmonies materialize and dissolve. The references are those of a Chain Reaction cut into pieces, of a Demdike Stare made agnostic or, again, of a Vladislav Delay passed under filters of leaden opacity and which, not surprisingly, has set a precedent, with Paperclip Minimiser above all. The movement is unpredictable and granular, minimal and saturated in the same gesture, and circularity is expressed through asymmetries: the individual instruments seem to travel on autonomous channels and meet at intervals to close lopsided sentences, in a slippery organism where time stops running in one direction only.
07/22/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
