![]() ![]() Streaks of drum and delay pile up in an onionskin palimpsest of fakeouts and false endings voices bob through the murk, and the occasional sharp-edged synth bass cuts through, but there’s no telling how any of it was made. The music’s means of production have historically been another point of obscurity. These tweaks to industry convention seem designed to disorient and unbalance, to leave the listener bobbing in a grayscale interzone without reference points or compass. It is also self-titled, and it does without track titles. Topdown Dialectic’s first album for Los Angeles label Peak Oil bears many similarities to its predecessors. Dub techno, with its emphasis on circuitry and spring reverbs, is a resolutely analog genre, but here it gets spun through a dizzying digital echo chamber of post-internet obfuscation. A loose weave of murmurs and wormholes, the music itself is bathed in mystery, its contours foggy and its provenance uncertain. Topdown Dialectic’s sound is a graphite smear of static, clatter, and hints of whispers: textures of gravel and elastic, shoe polish and sand, all arrayed over a submerged techno rhythm. Since at least the release of a 2014 self-titled EP for Seattle’s Further label (it’s hard to know what their 2013 debut cassette sounds like, since it has disappeared from the internet without much trace), they’ve hitched their horse to the grainy, dub-techno aesthetic popularized in the mid-1990s by Vainqueur, Vladislav Delay, and other artists affiliated with Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction label. That also makes for a pretty good description of Topdown Dialectic’s music. It’s a trail of digital breadcrumbs ground down to dust. A Blogspot account associated with the label behind their debut cassette has gone inactive. The Facebook page linked from their SoundCloud no longer exists neither does their Tumblr. They have not tweeted in more than three years. Trying to trace their trail back to the source, there’s a strong sense of being haunted by the internet’s recent past. But Topdown Dialectic’s facelessness feels specific to the current moment. This kind of mystique is hardly new in electronic music it is part of a hallowed tradition that runs from Basic Channel through Burial. The only confirmable fact is that they are part of Aught, a label collective whose members-Elizabethan Collar, De Leon, Xth Réflexion-are also anonymous (if they are even different people at all). That’s where the obscurity kicks in, because Topdown Dialectic’s identity is a mystery. ![]()
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