Sunday, August 10th, the elusive Topdown Dialectic will make his second-ever live appearance at our OPEN AIR event in DTLA.

One of our favorite contemporary ambient techno projects, Topdown Dialectic first emerged in 2013 with a self-titled cassette on Chicago’s Tailings label. That release quickly disappeared with little trace and was followed by a pair of mini-albums on Aught, a “collective” that featured the equally mysterious artists De Leon, Elizabethan Collar, Xth Réflexion, and Aci_Edits. Shrouded in complete anonymity, the collection of untitled glitchy, dubwise electronic compositions seemed to take on a life of their own, devoid of narrative and visual accompaniment.

In 2018, a second full-length album arrived on digital and vinyl via LA-based imprint Peak Oil with the first hints of the inner workings behind the music:

“The dissociative electronic designs of incognito American producer Topdown Dialectic originated as a set of software strategies, rather than compositions in the traditional sense. The recordings are captures and edits of various nonlinear sound-systems, shifting conditions, and reactions to internal changes. Despite such a conceptual basis the music is hyper-sensory, evocative, and emotive, meshing the impossible sonic geometries of early UK warehouse bleeps and IDM stutters with the gritty spatial abstraction of Basic Channel to chart dynamic and diaphanous electronic topographies, at once decentralized, parallel, and environmental.”

In taking on the difficult task of trying to describe the music… Beyond the obvious touch points of dub techno pioneers Basic Channel / Rhythm & Sound, Topdown Dialectic also finds a spiritual ancestor in German sound artist Jan Jelinek, whose approach is all about the transformation or distillation of sounds. On his 2001 masterpiece Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, milli-second jazz samples are looped and processed beyond recognition into minimalist collages, while his farben project “has its roots in Jelinek’s love of house as a reductionist vision of soul.”

Much like Jelinek, Topdown Dialectic seems to draw from a deep well of sound sources, possibly gathered from a record collection, field recordings, the internet, or some undiscovered musical excavation site. Ghostly traces of voices, live drums, and percussion appear throughout the open-ended compositions alongside fractured chords, machine grooves, and deep sub bass. Treated through Topdown Dialectic’s “software strategies,” these looping elements expand, contract, and echo into infinity; at times, delivering the euphoric feeling of suspending time itself.

Listen to the below track, which one Bandcamp user poetically described as: “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts uprooted at midnight, carried off and replanted in a lonelier terrain, blooming under the planets.“

Peak Oil founder Brian Foote had the following to say about the project in our Labels We Love interview: “In the instance of the Topdown Dialectic material, the artist didn’t want to be involved. This was an insanely common thing in the ‘90’s where the press even coined the term ‘faceless techno bollocks.’ No one put their name on the release and it wasn’t just because of contractual reasons or mystique. It was more like that doesn’t matter or that’s not what’s important.”

On Sunday, August 10th, Topdown Dialectic will make his second-ever live appearance at our OPEN AIR event in collaboration with In Between and Peak Oil. Not-to-be-missed, this event will be one of only a few Topdown Dialectic shows around the world (along with Atonal Berlin in August and MUTEK Montreal in September).

Pre-sale tickets are available now via Resident Advisor and going fast!

Below, a few more of our favorite Topdown Dialectic tracks (honestly, they’re all our favorite so we highly recommend diving in):