Traces

Anyone stumbling across the utopian cerulean vistas of Cahl Sel’s Blue EP earlier this year could have been forgiven for wondering if the record was a forgotten gem from three decades past, rather than a brand-new production from a young upstart.

For one thing, the label that put it out, Reflective, is itself a vestige of leftfield electronic music’s golden age, having lain largely dormant since 1997. Reflective was resurrected in 2022 to release Cahl Sel’s debut EP, Every Moment; in its prime, the imprint had been responsible for a wealth of mid-’90s classics—records from bright-eyed mischief-makers like label founder Spacetime Continuum and IDM pioneer µ-Ziq, recording as Kid Spatula, who lured curious ravers in stranger, squirrelier directions. The sound of both Cahl Sel EPs, particularly Blue, invoked that era in their clean-lined drum programming and bucolic washes of synthesizer, and with good reason: The San Francisco musician, aka Jasper Sharp, makes and performs his music on a hardware setup that harkens back to a halcyon, pre-laptop era.

Cahl Sel’s debut album, Traces, sounds even more like a lost ambient-techno classic. The drums move like precision-engineered machinery: sturdy yet understated kick drums, die-cutting snares, diamantine hi-hats spinning in tricky clockwork patterns. Arpeggios twirl in elegant arcs against airy pads that glow like a tropical sunrise. Tracing the path of Cahl Sel’s serpentine synthesizer melodies, it’s easy to imagine hothouse flowers filmed in stop motion: green shoots whipping upward, uncurling in midair, and slowly exploding into star-shaped blossoms tinged with cadmium and azure.

Traces carves a sidewinding path between sleek, propulsive cuts and more atmospheric passages. The jittery techno of opener “Blink” slows to a languid electro crawl in “Call to Mind” before the drums disappear completely in “Livin,” an otherworldly sketch that runs new-age tones through the mazelike circuitry of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. But, as with the best ambient techno of the ’90s, the division between “dance music” and “listening music” is purely notional: It’s a full-body sound that rewards both energetic movement and horizontal repose.

Some of the most energetic tracks are notable largely for what they don’t do. “Blink” begins with spring-loaded claps and hi-hats, but the pads drip down like sun-drenched honey, as if to say, not so fast, tiger; not only that, but there’s no bassline, an absence that leaves you hanging in a tantalizing state of perpetual anticipation. Given the speedy tempo and energetic rhythms, you might expect it to evolve into a more forceful club track, yet it never does. Instead, it simply floats in a delirious, delicious interzone.

It’s not hard to guess at some of Sharp’s influences. Aphex Twin’s early work looms large; the mournful “Ancient and Distant,” with its eerie, undulating melody, could easily pass as an outtake from Autechre’s Amber. The cozy drone underpinning “Left Eye” pulls from the same well from which Boards of Canada drew their fuzzy VHS fantasias. Traces of Burger/Ink’s great Las Vegas linger in the intricate counterpoints and dubby undercurrents. And the knife-edged electro patterns look back fondly at Gescom, Bola, and other zero-gravity B-boys affiliated with the Skam label.

But most influential of all might be Spacetime Continuum himself, which probably isn’t coincidental: The Reflective chief, aka Jonah Sharp, just happens to be Jasper’s father. It’s striking how thoroughly Jasper absorbed his dad’s vision of electronic music, and it’s fun to imagine him as a boy, soaking up his parents’ record collection as if by osmosis—spooning Cheerios while the idyllic sounds of tracks like “Pressure” and “Fluresence” poured from the kitchen speakers. But Cahl Sel’s talents are so clearly his own—just listen to how masterfully he fans out the stacked harmonies of “Clear,” one of the album’s emotional highlights—that his parentage should be considered little more than a footnote.

For a similar reason, I hesitate to call his music retro, however much it may resemble its influences. It’s certainly no more narrowly retro in its intent than any number of other contemporary electronic projects: From trance to jungle to minimal to dubstep, dance music is awash in throwback energy, and has been for years now. And this kind of wistful ambient techno makes for a special case. The prime years of this sound were awfully short, lasting from the early-mid-’90s until the turn of the millennium. And the canon was so paltry—once you’ve tallied the classics, the dropoff in quality is swift and steep—that records like Cahl Sel’s read as a kind of wish fulfillment: a belief that there remains more to be done in the genre, and a desire to make good on its untapped potential. Yes, Traces bears ample traces of those who came before him, but Cahl Sel is looking forward, not back.