GOOD POINT Since the early '90s, Sharp's amassed a catalog of brilliant work.

It’s hard to remember now, but the early to mid-’90s were a golden age for down-tempo electronic music, the kind that’s usually referred to as “chill-out.” This was well before the sound had devolved into the lifestyle-friendly wallpaper music so much of it is today; instead, it was a field in which a trial-and-error curiosity was the defining production ethos. Out of that era came Jonah Sharp, the Edinburgh-born, San Fran–based producer most known for his output as Spacetime Continuum and for helming the long-running Reflective label. Sharp will be making a rare NYC appearance when he plays a hybrid live-DJ set at the techno-oriented Demon Days, the party run by Carl Craig and Gamall, on Thursday 6.

Craig won’t be playing at this edition, but Sharp is a fitting replacement. Like Craig’s, his sound is infused with classical and jazz references, making for angular, finely crafted music that’s by turns stirring and contemplative. The difference is largely in the beats per minute: Whereas most of Craig’s work is created for the dance floor, Spacetime Continuum’s rhythms tend to be more for horizontal moments. It’s a style that’s often labeled ambient techno, or even psybient (i.e., psychedelic + ambient).

“Psybient…that’s an interesting one,” fortysomething Sharp says, laughing. “I don’t really know what to call my music, just as I don’t really make music with an audience in mind. I don’t make it for 14-year-old girls, nor am I making it for spotty guys with beards and no girlfriends. So I always find it interesting to find out who likes it. And in the last six or seven years, most of the DJ bookings I’ve gotten are at psy-trance parties. Those guys go all night long, with certain drugs—I think, maybe—and at points they need to chill out, in the old sense of the term. So I suppose that is my audience, really.”

That audience may be getting bigger soon. Though plenty of Sharp’s tracks have appeared on various compilations, most of the original Reflective singles and EPs—not only those from Spacetime Continuum, but labelmates like Subtropic, Velocette and Reagenz, a recently revived collaboration with Germany’s Move D—were released only on vinyl. “I’m in the process of digitizing the back catalog, and we’re going to put it up on Beatport,” Sharp says, “so soon anyone will be able to hear it. The whole process has been fascinating, sort of like looking at an image of who I was ten years ago.”

Sharp has long been known as much for his wide-ranging array of outside projects and collaborations; a recent endeavor, for instance, found him coproducing and doing sound design for an album by Global Drum Project, featuring the Dead’s Mickey Hart and tabla master Zakir Hussain. One of his odder pairings took place in the mid-’90s, when he provided the music for ethnobiologist-philosopher (and psychotropic-drug enthusiast) Terence McKenna’s musings. “I was a little worried that it would just be a case of me sort of playing underneath him,” Sharp recalls. “But it turned out that we were working together, building up and dropping down in unison. He would start talking about DMT, and I would think, Oh, I better play something weird with funny noises! I mean, it got a bit heavier than that, but you get the idea.”

Demon Days’ Gamall is an old friend of Sharp’s; he helped run Reflective in the mid-’90s, and the pair have produced together as Capries. “Jonah’s sort of an undisclosed treasure,” Gamall says. “People who know his music love him, but not everyone knows him. And they should. He was a jazz drummer before he was an electronic musician, and it really shows—he has a kind of sensibility that’s really inspiring. And inspiration is what Demon Days is about; Carl is totally inspiring, of course, so it’s logical that Jonah is the party’s guest.”

Sharp himself looks at the gig through a introspective, somewhat philosophical lens. “I’m sure I’ll be playing a lot of the old catalog,” he says, “but interpreted in a new way. I’m looking at it as an opportunity to make sense of what I’ve done, to understand it more in a way. And my hope is that other people will understand it as well.”

Hear him now:

Demon Days is at APT Thu 6.