Tone Glow 240: Izaak Schlossman (Topdown Dialectic, False Aralia, Loveshadow)

Izaak Schlossman

Izaak Schlossman (b. 1987) is an American musician born and based in the Bay Area. After growing up in San Mateo County, he found his way to Philadelphia and Detroit, cities in which he found likeminded individuals in the musical underground. His early ventures include the Ace of Tapes label and the wide-ranging starcircleanatomy project, where he released loop experiments, freak-folk shenanigans, and various forms of lo-fi ambience. He honed in on a particular strain of lush, minimalist dub techno during the early 2010s with Morris Arch Nightwork and especially Topdown Dialectic. He’s released multiple albums under the latter moniker, most recent of which is the double LP False LP A (2026). From 2024 to 2025, his False Aralia label released six 12-inches under his various guises, including highlights like Selfsame, Externalism, and Vehicular. Schlossman also creates pop music as Loveshadow with his partner Anya Prisk. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Schlossman on July 10th, 2026 to discuss his early electronic experiments, biking across the country, and the inspirations behind his various projects.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: You did an interview with Dumpster Diving Blog back in 2011 and in it you said you love doing physical work, specifically enjoying when “the power dynamic is good.” When did you first realize you liked doing physical work? And what do you mean about good power dynamics?

Izaak Schlossman: Oh my god. Probably my first job ever was in the summer between 6th and 7th grade. My friend’s dad hired us to renovate their basement under his supervision. He would set us up, tell us what to do for the day, then go to work. He’d say, “Cut these 2x4s, drill them into this other thing.” Stuff like that. It was cool to have that sort of responsibility. The result of that work is so palpable that it was really fun off the bat. I thought, this is the sort of thing I’d like to do.

Around the time I did that interview, I was living in Philadelphia and working for this woman—she owned this café that I was a barista at. She asked if I had any experience with construction work because she needed help with a house she owned. I thought back to that summer and other stuff I’d done in the meantime and said, “Yeah, I can do that.” So I was working for her, renovating houses, and that’s probably what I was talking about at the time. We had a good power dynamic. Every job is a power dynamic, right? In a corporation, there’s this diffused structure of power, but in a one-to-one mentor-mentee relationship, it all depends on the personalities of the two people involved. She was an awesome mentor and taught me a lot; I was lucky to learn from someone like that.

Do you approach the arts in the same way that you think about doing physical work?

In general, music was very much a trade up until a certain point. I don’t know when you could say things specifically changed, but being a musician used to be a trade in the same way that someone would be a plumber. You’d work this weird schedule, you’d do this thing with your hands, and you’d be in the service of other people in this business. But as it pertains to the stuff I do, I like thinking about music and sound as a plastic medium. I’m shaping it, manipulating it, and forming it. That’s definitely how I approach it.

What were your earliest experiences with making and hearing music?

My dad is a musician and he gigged around a lot in the Bay Area—a lot of funky, old spots on the coast and Irish bars. It was a chill environment because there were a lot of musicians around. We’d go to somebody’s house and they’d have a jam. Every weekend throughout my childhood we were out at a gig. And, you know, I was bored (laughter). I was just sitting around and drawing at a table while a band was playing. As far as making music, that started happening when I was in my teens. My parents split up and my stepdad was an old-school electronic musician—an OG music software and synthesizer guy. He had a lot of stuff around the house that I wanted to mess with. This was in the early 2000s. There was a program called Acid by Sony where they had these huge loop libraries you could draw from and just put them in a timeline. I really glommed on to early 2000s programs like that and started making my own electronic music in my early teens. And then I never stopped.

Did your dad and stepdad release music then?

Oh, yeah. My dad was a big CD Baby guy. They called it “indie” but it meant just doing stuff yourself. My stepdad, yes. He kind of had this whole life as a rock star and then came to the Bay Area and started working in tech in the ’90s. He already had some experience doing some software writing in an audio context, which was more of a rare skill at the time. He got picked up to do that and joined that world.

Did you hear stories from your dad and stepdad about their musical experiences growing up? And did that help you realize that music could be your actual job?

They played together and knew each other beforehand—they were part of the same group of people. So yeah, I met a lot of people who were dedicated musicians. I didn’t know who did or didn’t have a day job, but there were so many people who did this that it was their identity. It was interesting. It was a very colorful group in a Bay Area way (laughs). A lot of crunchy ex-hippies, a lot of people from Ireland who came over in the ’90s to escape The Troubles, and I spent a lot of time around a lot of interesting adults. I absorbed a lot from that period.

Were there any important or memorable gigs you saw when you were younger?

There was this place that we would go to a lot. It’s still there—it’s called the San Gregorio General Store. It’s in this little town that’s basically just a post office, a general store, and some farms. It’s about a half mile from the ocean. This general store hosts bands, and I have a lot of good memories of that place. The owner is a parental figure—he would take us around. There’s a stand of woods in the back and we’d go hiking around there. It was a pretty amazing place to have as a curious kid. Not one particular show stands out, but that place did.

Did you spend a lot of time exploring nature as a kid? Do you feel like those experiences shaped the way you thought about sound or listening as a practice?

Oh yeah, definitely. It must have seeped in there. I really liked being outdoors, but I was also such a video game kid. If I’m being honest, I probably just wanted to be playing Super Nintendo. That stuff had a grip on me. It was unhealthy, and I was obsessed with it. And I’m still obsessed with the computer—it never went away, it just changed forms. I would say that I gained an appreciation for nature and a sense of slowness later in life, like 16, 17, 18 years old. I would definitely just go out. There’s this cool redwood area in San Mateo County, where I was born. If you just go up the hill from the Bay towards the ocean, there’s a mountain range in between and there’s all these redwoods up there. I remember going with my friends and for the first time in my life just really revering it.

So you were born in San Mateo. Did you also grow up there?

I grew up in a town called Burlingame in San Mateo County and it’s right near the San Francisco airport. There’s some suburbs down there. We lived in the Seattle area for a year when I was 2, and then we moved back within a year. Other than that I was only in the Bay when I was a kid.

Is there anything you think is significant about how much you played video games? Was this a solo venture or something social?

There’s this thing I’ve been thinking about with platforms in general, and video games are kind of like a platform where the player is a user, and it’s the same relationship that one would have with social media or any digital space. I have a sense of disillusionment in this platform space, and I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think it’s interesting in the sense that you can engage with something bigger than you but not physically, but I don’t know if it’s healthy to dissolve yourself so fully into that. I went pretty far into that as a kid, and I think I scared my parents, like, “oh your kid only wants to play video games….” I’m glad I didn’t get too into it after a certain point. It’s the same with people getting lost in Facebook or something. This sort of ungrounded disappearance only serves the platform—it doesn’t really serve the person using it, and I worry about that. I mean, I could sit and make music forever on Ableton but I’ll be like, “No, go outside.”

I was always joking like, “If I break my leg, I’ll play Final Fantasy again.” And then COVID happened and it was like, “Don’t do it Izaak, don’t do it.” I watched The Sopranos instead, but TV shows are kind of the same feeling for me. They’re just too good, they hit too hard. You have to resist the temptation to get too in there.

What’s the difference between engaging with video games or TV shows or social media and being obsessed with making music? Is it because there’s something that comes out of it?

Right, you get an object out of it. I don’t want to put a value judgment on it because people should just do whatever makes them happy, but in terms of my own personal satisfaction, for sure—you go really far in and retrieve some sort of object. And it’s like, what are these things? What am I pulling out of the Ableton world? And to your question, that’s just this virtual way of making music. I don’t know if I’d feel that way about somebody who spent all their time playing guitar or piano. There’s something about this virtual, computer, technological space that has its own essence and it’s different from traditional notions of skill building. Technology feels very other in a Promethean sense. It is “us” because we made it, but it’s also separate from us in a very fundamental way.

I was making electronic music only on the computer until my later teens. I definitely had this moment around the end of high school where I was like, I have to connect with the real world. I have to get rootsy. I started playing a lot of guitar. I asked my parents for piano lessons. It was kind of way too late to get good at it, but I knew I had to get corporeal and ground myself. I was a teenager reading the Beats, I was listening to Phil Elverum. I was just like, “I gotta get real,” and I had a shock. I think I’ve balanced this as an adult, but there was definitely a moment when I pulled into this other zone very strongly because I felt like I’d gone too far.

Did you take piano lessons?

I did. I studied jazz piano with this guy who was a limo driver. This was someone that my dad had met at a gig or something like that. He played jazz piano in lounges in his spare time. His name was Steve. He was like, “I’m gonna teach you how to play “Mr. P.C.” We had the fakebook and it was fun. I couldn’t do it to save my life in a performative way, but I learned about stuff that I carried through to today. This was during the freak folk era. I was paying attention to all that, so I made some outsider acoustic music. I made plunky electronic music as a kid, and now I was trying to make something like Sung Tongs or Akron/Family. I was mostly doing stuff on my own, but I was also collaborating with some friends. We released some tapes—we made them and gave them to people. In college, I started a tape label with some friends of mine and we would put out our various music. Some of it was collaborative, too.

This was Ace of Tapes?

Yeah.

That was when you were in Philly. Did you go to school in Philly?

No. I graduated high school and I went to UC Santa Cruz for a year and then I dropped out. In this quest to “get real,” me and my friends did a summer of hobo traveling out to Philly. And it was because we knew a person there. We were riding the trains and hitchhiking. It was fun and nothing bad happened.

Did you “get real,” as you said?

(laughs). Yeah. It was extreme, and I did something I didn’t know I could do. Being out there for like six weeks, we’d just hang out, sit around for a day, waiting for the train to come. Growing up suburban-style and in a stable home, I was just like, “I’m gonna do this crazy thing.” It was so different from what I knew before.

Who was the friend you went with? Was this Mose [Wintner]?

No, it wasn’t Mose. I went with my friends Joey and Pauly, who I met at UC Santa Cruz. We were visiting our friend Chris, who moved there. His older brother had moved there before when we were kids, and he ended up in this early 2000s warehouse dweller scene. Chris would visit and be like, “Philly’s so cool. We went to this crazy Lightning Bolt show in this warehouse.” So he had it in his mind to end up in Philly. He went to UC Santa Cruz with me but dropped out almost immediately and moved to Philly. After a year there, I dropped out too and moved to Philly. So we did that trip, wound up in Philly, and I don’t know what I was looking for at that point in my life, but I was just like, college dorms are not it (laughter). I got a little job, a room with some people who were all kind of older than me—we had shows in our basement—and it was great. I stayed there for a year, and it was a hard year emotionally because I was adjusting to so much stuff—it was my early 20s. After that year, I decided to go finish school while I still could and wanted. I went back to Santa Cruz.

That’s when the Ace of Tapes label came back. The people I met off the bat were still there. The ones who made music just glommed together, and we thought we should just make tapes. We were inspired by Not Not Fun and all that kind of stuff—that noise, cassette renaissance thing. There was this group of UC Berkeley kids that we met because we were into the same music and went to the same shows. Mose was part of that group. It was a wonderful time. We’d jam in that free, ambient, open-ended way, and we’d just record it and that would be the release.

Can you talk about your starcircleanatomy project? You mentioned making electronic music when you were a teenager. What sort of things were you focusing on with this? In the interview I mentioned earlier, you said it was “a long-term attempt to explain an aesthetic confusion.” What did you mean by that? It feels kind of in line with all the projects on False Aralia.

I’m still confused (laughter). Instead of putting it all under one name like I did then, I split off into a bunch of different directions. But back then, I liked doing this folky, singer-songwriter acoustic guitar music, but there was also some techno-y stuff. There were a bunch of things pulling me in a bunch of directions and I’d try to put them together. I don’t know if it was coherent to anybody. It felt like every day I was doing something new—I was like a sponge with all this music I was hearing and all these people around me. It all appealed to me equally so I was just ingesting and synthesizing all the time, like “fuck it, if it doesn’t make sense, that’s okay.” That’s what I meant by that quote.

Shortly after that project, you had the Morris Arch Nightwork release in 2012. That album feels like a primordial Topdown Dialectic. There’s all the dubby ambience on there. Why the name change for this project? You were already doing a lot of things earlier—why not fold this new music into what had come before?

I remember having this moment where I was like, “I’m gonna shut up now.” (laughter). I remember writing a song and being like, “This is my last song.” I felt ready to explore electronic music in that tracky way again. I was like, okay, I’m gonna start a new phase and change the name. There was this place in Philly, and there’s no way it’s still there, but at the time it was called PIFAS. It was a play on the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, but it was the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study. It was a warehouse space with studios and classes and lectures, but they also had shows. It was an amazing, communal DIY space.

The original crew moved on and there were still studios there. I ended up renting the basement, and I had seen a bunch of crazy shows in there so when I got the place I really had to clean it out. It was huge, too. I set up all my stuff—a drum kit, some keyboards, my computer. It was a really gnarly, weird space, but I could be loud and play down there for as long as I wanted. I remember going to work and biking there, being there late most nights. It was definitely different from Topdown. I was doing long takes, like improvisational playing over loops and then cutting it up. I learned a lot during that time. I don’t know if I was happy with the music, but I knew I was making progress.

What do you think you learned from that project that you brought into your first Topdown Dialectic cassette on Tailings in 2013? I have a copy of the original tape, and it’s only because I read Philip Sherburne’s review of a later album where he said it was basically impossible to hear this. I got so annoyed because it was literally on sale at Discogs right then so I just bought it. That’s some fake “lost media” stuff. Much love to Philip though, he’s the best. [Editor’s Note: Kim purchased the cassette in 2019 after that initial review came out. He apologizes for his anger.]

Maybe that was him giving everyone the tip, y’know? (laughter). I was wondering if you had it because it was a Chicago thing. And I’m glad that reissue happened. It’s funny because I hadn’t really had my Basic Channel phase yet. My exposure to dub techno wasn’t the original stuff, it was the 2000s netlabel watered-down versions. I didn’t know the references—I just knew the world. There was this netlabel called Thinner, which was German and released 128kbps mp3s as official releases. Some of it was really derivative, like rote distillations of Echocord. But some of it was good and still holds up to me now. I’m thinking right now about what I was going for, and it was probably something of an early outsider house sensibility, like early L.I.E.S. and Madteo. That stuff was really getting me. I was trying to have a voice that felt like my own but in that space. After having gone through so many waves of being disillusioned—by a whole life of making music—I wanted to try again. And I would say that’s what that time was good for.

That’s interesting because I remember when I first listened to that early tape I was trying to figure out where your music was coming from. In the late 2000s and early 2010s I was listening to a lot of Silent Season, which released a bunch of ambient and dub techno.

I only knew them by name. It’s interesting because I was waiting a long time for people to get into techno. My first connection to a real underground culture was in Philly at house shows, but it was noise and metal. There were two people—maybe a few more—in Philly who I knew that were into techno. There was Profligate, who would do squelchy, Container-style techno at house shows. And then there was this guy Davey, whose project was called Mincemeat or Tenspeed. He’d plug a bunch of guitar pedals in a feedback loop and it would self-oscillate, and he’d tweak it. It took a long time, maybe around 2010 or 2011, for kids I knew through arts and music to get really into techno. It was around then I made the Morris Arch Nightwork music, that I had any real connection with this music in real life, where people I knew would like it. It was a renewal.

In 2012, an old friend of mine from UC Santa Cruz called me. She said she got an internship at an architectural preservation society in Detroit and that she was gonna move there. I said, “fuck yeah.” I had just gotten out of a long relationship and I had a floater-y job working on those houses. I had a lot of reverence for Detroit, and I had some friends in Chicago so I went there first and then went to Detroit after. I lived there for half a year, and that was a big moment. That’s where I made the first Topdown stuff, where I was like, “Oh, this is different, I’m gonna think about it differently.” I met more people who were into DJing, and it was so wonderful to meet people who liked dance music the way I liked it.

That Detroit move was when I really felt like I’d found a group of people. And it’s not like the people I connected with were OG Detroit techno folks, it was mostly white kids from the suburbs who moved into the city and wanted to be closer to their own vision of music and community. But also, people like Kyle Hall and Jay Daniel were DJing. The cool thing was that everybody knew everybody—there weren’t social barriers between scenes. If you wanted an event to pop, everyone needed to come. There was this sense that you had to show up to your friend’s show or nobody would be there, you know? It was very cross-pollinated. Kyle Hall and Jay Daniel had their monthly at a bar that everybody went to, and there were cool rock shows, and there was the whole Wolf Eyes noise thing happening. I moved back to Philly after that, in 2013, and things started to move more into that dance music direction. I was there until 2016.

I found your photography work and your Flickr account from back in the day, and I know you did the photo that’s on the cover for the Morris Arch Nightwork album. Can you tell me about how you got interested in photography? Did it start around this time?

It was always a thing. My grandma—my dad’s mom—was a prolific amateur photographer. My dad always took pictures and he gave me an old Nikkormat 35mm camera from the 1960s and I took it with me everywhere. I always felt like it was a cool way to express myself.

It makes me wonder about the art direction with the False Aralia work. I’m curious about how you’re approaching the artwork in relation to the music. And maybe that happened with the Topdown Dialectic art too with the minimalist white and grey. How much are you thinking about the visual aspect of your work?

For a long time I was like, there should be no art. The Topdown tape you have was just a picture I took that I wrapped around the cassette. I had another tape label called /\Aught and that had no art. It was like, music is a machine that does something to your brain and you don’t need an image to color or influence it. It was about direct perception. It was about getting to this notion that music can be physically influential to a listener. With dance music, it absolutely activates people to do certain things, and it’s the same with ambient music and deep listening. I wanted to hone in on a mode of listening that I loved, which was that sort of “getting into your own head” experience with the help of sound. By eliminating all the context—even the surfaces of the tapes by making it clear—I was hoping to communicate how you could engage with this. I think it kind of backfired because everyone was like, “Well, who made it?” (laughter). Anonymity wasn’t the purpose. And maybe I was worried about being scrutinized too, but I didn’t really have any intention in that way… like, the fact that anybody cared at all was a miracle.

Working with Brian [Foote] for Peak Oil, he told me that there was this format he used for all his art with the square. I still didn’t want art at the time, so we went for the white on white. We thought there was only going to be one record—we didn’t plan to do the other volumes—but it was a success, so we kept pulling from the pile. It was like, how do we iterate from there? With the False Aralia stuff, I feel like I’ve been trying to soften my stances—I don’t need to be a hardass anymore. If I was going to do something and have it make a mark, what would be something that made sense with the sound? Me and my friend Nick [Almquist] came up with this glitchy Photoshop thing. It starts from interference patterns and then we iterate it into a fractal-y shape, and then brushed it away and tried to make it into an object. It was not unlike what I was doing with the audio. I was just trying to come up with a complementary process that was iterative. I really enjoy series and that sense of worldbuilding—some of my favorite 12-inch labels are like this.

How do you feel like your process has changed from the Topdown Dialectic work and the False Aralia stuff? How much of it is additive versus subtractive? On the Zero Key release you have the R&B vocals, so I’m wondering if you start from that and go from there, for example.

If I had to sum up the Topdown Dialectic process, it’s a subtractive compositional mode. I wasn’t building an arrangement or writing. It’s kind of the default way of working with a DAW, like I have a bunch of stacked sounds and loops that are filling the space. When people work in those programs, it’s kind of where things go—you add a sound, you add another one that complements it, and then you add another and so on until you reach a saturation point. That’s what I do too, but what I was trying to do was start from this maximum and then take stuff away. The final songs are something I nervously arrive at.

Nervously?

I can’t stop messing around, you know? I wouldn’t say I’m an economical person; I’m a maximalist, but I just cut and keep cutting. That’s how all those tunes got made: it was a bunch of things, and I removed sounds bit by bit.

You talked about not being familiar with the original dub techno stuff. When did you eventually hear that music, and how did it shape the work you made thereafter?

It happened around the time I made that cassette when I moved to Detroit. I listened to Rhythm & Sound and went nuts. I have to say though that I was into Vladislav Delay and Luomo before all this. But yeah, I was listening to Vainqueur and all that stuff at this point now. And it’s weird, you know that experience where you’re just not ready for something and you can see so clearly that you weren’t ready for it when you look back on your musical development? I remember listening to this when I was younger and not getting it. I thought it was boring. But it was really hitting for me then, and that’s the best thing in the world, when you can find something you can live in for a while.

Were you also then going back and listening to dub reggae as well?

I really got into reggae after I made the Topdown LPs. This was after I left Philly and went back to California. In 2015, I knew I wanted to leave and I knew I wanted to do something big. I rode my bike every day as a commuter and I wanted to go on a bike tour and it felt like a good chance—I rode my bike from Philly to California. Over the summer I stopped by Detroit, and it just so happened that it was Movement. My friends were like, “You gotta stay for DEMF!” So I stayed and that was the first time I went to No Way Back and I saw Scott [Zacharias]. It was totally mind-opening. Getting into other music in the context of dance music, it became this nested secret history of, like, “these are the glam rock records that are actually techno records.” Scott has the power to do that. So that set me on the path to learn about the secret history of dance music, and that’s what led me to reggae.

I was really obsessed with the Edward George podcast, The Strangeness of Dub. That was the biggest influence for me in terms of thinking about music in a really long time. I can’t recommend it enough. He takes a historical lens to it, and he also talks about the symbolism and the reification of those sounds into all other music. “Watering down” is not a fair thing to say about dub techno and its various formations because it’s more than that, but when you take it back to Jamaican and Caribbean history, the history of the slave trade, and all this history and understanding for how it was distilled into a style of music that reflects the place and time… I came to it with a whole new reverence.

How are you folding reggae into your own work? The Vehicular release in particular feels like it’s more pointedly doing that.

The half-tempo thing I’m doing on the Vehicular release was definitely reggae, but I wasn’t setting out to do that. It was more of an intuitive thing, like, “this project wants to go there.” I’ve been enjoying these half-tempo rhythms lately where there’s this illusion of tempo. There’s an interesting concept in gamelan called irama where there are layers of rhythm that are of different densities and they interplay over each other. It ranges from the fast stuff all the way to the gong, which hits every like 16 bars, so then it’s like, “What’s the tempo?” That’s what I’ve been trying to get at with False Aralia, this quantum, indeterminate notion of the speed of something. I was definitely trying to do that with one of the Vehicular tracks. But yeah, it was definitely inspired by reggae with the aqueous nature of dub. I’m trying to tap into that mercurial, hard-to-pin-down thing of, “Is it the original? Is it the reflection?”

Are there other styles of music that impact your work that may be surprising to listeners?

I’m a nut for pop music. The whole Balearic thing really bit me (laughs). I’m obsessed. I love Antena and classic jazzy pop. One thing I’ve been really into in the past couple years is the Uruguayan jazz-pop scene from the 1980s and 1990s.

So like all the stuff that’s coming out after Eduardo Mateo’s 1970s material? There’s this one artist I really love, Mariana Ingold.

Yes, the whole Fattoruso family. That crew’s stuff has been destroying me. That South American ’80s and ’90s jazz-pop is so vivid. Some Argentinian stuff too. Harmonically, it’s like the opposite of a PLO Man track (laughter), but I love them both equally.

You’ve made various tracks, like the 14th track on the new Topdown Dialectic album, where you kind of have the vapors of a pop song.

A lot of that is manipulating samples and pop songs where I’m literally doing just that. It’s like this cooked, other version, like how it might form itself as a memory instead of as an experience of the real thing. I like trying to get at that, how sweet something can feel as a half-remembered thing. It really affects you in a different way, and you can get right to that by accessing this watery neither-here-nor-there in-betweenness. I’m always hoping I can get to a point where it’s emotional, and sometimes it slips through because everything’s always shifting and reforming. It’s not quite recognizable and it’s hard to know where it begins or ends, and how you engage with it is a mode of investigation. I always thought that if you provided a little gap, somebody could jump across it. And that’s what I hope people can do, where they enter into a song and will want to engage because I create a little bit of confusion.

Can you talk about Topdown Dialectic’s name? How’d you come up with that?

I was listening to a lot of radio rap back then and that was a phrase you’d hear all the time—“topdown.” It sounded nice enough and it rolled off the tongue.

You met Anya Prisk in 2016. Was that after you moved out of Philly?

It was after I moved back to Oakland. I got a job at a café. I had just come back from my bike tour for three days and I went to a house party. I met this guy and he was like, “You need a job? Come make sandwiches at this café.” I met Anya there. And now we’re gonna get married.

Oh my god, congrats!

It’s been a long, crazy journey! Our friendship started with music and we saw things the same way. She’s got a similar, life-long, knotty, circuitous love of different things. But we loved the same things, like, we connected over boogie and soul, but we’d also done our time in DIY, noisy, terminal indie worlds. Like oh, you were down here in these trenches but you also like all this other stuff that nobody really talks about? It was yacht rock and things like that. I’m sure you also feel this when you meet someone who shares your imprint of music. It’s a rare, beautiful thing. Naturally, we decided to collaborate.

This makes a lot of sense given the music you’ve made together, and then you also have the S Transporter music with her and Ryan Spencer.

Yeah, Ryan was a friend from Detroit.

And I’m not even sure if the False Aralia stuff is collaborative at all, but I’m curious about how you approach making music with others and what that’s like.

Yeah the Vehicular stuff was with Lucas, and we made some music together as De Leon. It started as a literal gamelan thing because we had access to a gamelan room, but then it turned into a more general exploration of percussion and rhythm. Working with Anya is cool because I can access her soulful, musical space that is unique to her. One thing that’s so interesting is that for her, a fully-formed idea just comes out at the spur of a moment. It’s always perfect the first time, and that’s not something I can do at all. I have to work at things until they’re utter mush (laughter). Her melodic sense and songwriting is great, and we both contribute to that. It’s really fun exploring that because through doing it, it’s sculpted our relationship in a cool way. We share such a tightly wound sense of beauty.

How did things change from the first Loveshadow album to the second?

The first album we made over a long period of time without a goal in mind. We just wanted to make tracks and see what happened. The pandemic hit and we thought we should turn it into a record—we had more time, our social lives were on pause, so we decided to finish it. We cold-called Music From Memory, like I just emailed Jamie [Tiller] and told him I was a fan of the label. That Deviant Pop From Europe (2018) compilation came out and that was exactly what we were trying to do. I told him we were paying attention to the same records and he dug our music. It honestly felt like a miracle that he was down.

The second record was made in a much shorter period of time, with the intention of making an album. It was honestly the most work I’ve put into anything—it was really hard. Listening to all this music and trying to be a student of pop songwriting, and having a DJ ear about it… like if I’m gonna pick the good stuff from this, what does an album sound like? Albums in the ’80s were written with a totally different mindset, like “we need to have a reggae song, we need to have a Brazilian song.” You know what I mean? There’s the one song that people like the Balearic cut off of, and that’s how those albums were organized (laughter). So if I was making an album, it was like, how can every song be “the cut”? We dug really deep and I spent a lot of time fussing over details. That came out on Dark Entries, which was cool because they’re local. Josh [Cheon] was just immediately super down for it. The albums are very different and I’m really proud of them.

There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?

I’m happy that I can trust my own artistic vision without going down the rabbit hole of wondering if it’s worth pursuing. I’m happy to be doing this, even if it’s confusing. I don’t feel lost, you know? And that would be the scariest thing as a creative person, to not have any confidence in it. It’s like cooking, like you throw ingredients together and you’re like, “Oh, it tastes pretty good.” At least I have that.

Topdown Dialectic’s latest album, False LP A, is out now. His other releases on the False Aralia label can be found at their Bandcamp page.

Thank you for reading the 240th issue of Tone Glow. Uruguay mentioned.

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