Topdown Dialectic - False Aralia LP A 2xLP (Pre-order)

PRE-ORDER --- AVAILABLE JULY 3

i'm guarding the orifices to leave them intact. it’s an attempt not to sublimate, in order to work the edges down to their fiendish implications and code the spired gongs; in which case a single word might engage the whole and send us rushing into waves of contraction. the pack itself forms a kind of ledger: biological insurants walking laps around the rectory, only partially washed up. we're waiting for the rest to arrive. till then, i'll plane the frigid marsh each night with a big machine. this mining of possible conclusions and their sputtered-out, uninterrupted enhancement gives form to the wreck of great love; the moment of its peak perceptible only upon review, the heart an ill-formed tool for that sort of work. reaching offscreen, the sky resurfaces and the room contracts, proposing a fresh consensus to each of its occupants. we wonder from afar: are we content to let them go? could we even survive ourselves?

Since the early 2010s, photographer and producer Izaak Schlossman has been surreptitiously using the Topdown Dialectic moniker to frame his most enigmatic and most psychedelic productions: faceless pure sound experiments that ogled dub and techno archetypes from somewhere far beyond the veil. This generous 2LP collection surveys over a decade of persistent activity, pulling together recently unearthed gear written between 2013 and 2016 (the same time period as the iconic Peak Oil trilogy) and muddling it with more contemporary material. It's a rare chance to fully comprehend the slow, measured evolution of the project: its genesis as a method to fractalize various bass music frequencies with suggestion rather than over-compression, and its ongoing advancement through sensitively finessed ASMR ambiance towards spangled neo-psychedelia.

So it's no surprise that the lengthy suite of five-minute snapshots was initially devised while Schlossman was preparing for his first ever Topdown Dialectic live appearance in 2025. A hazed early morning, open air performance that's still lodged in the memory banks of anyone who witnessed it, the set provided the narrative anchor for the album, blurring the past and present and reaching tentatively into the future - ideal material for audiences whose brains are fully plasticized. The tracks, while divided, sound as if they're breathing over and into one another; beats and phrases materialize and dissolve just for moments, leaving the mind to fill in the gaps with any available sonic material. What might reflect the bright neon light of acid house at first soon embodies the flicker of a candle over a desk of drum machines in a Midwestern basement, or the first blush of sunlight over a tiny campground as subwoofers creak in the distance.

It's music that asks the listener to be involved in the creation itself, projecting their own shapes on the negative space, their discreet fantasies on haunted stretches of near silence. Schlossman's identity was never the point, Topdown Dialectic was always a scrying stone intended to divine far more personal revelations.