Spacetime Continuum is the brainchild of Jonah Sharp, who studied jazz in Scotland and cut his teeth in London's rave scene before moving to San Francisco in 1991.

Sharp's beginnings were not particularly inspiring, in particular the terrible collaboration with the prophet of LSD Terence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime (Astralwerks, 1993), the two collaborations with Pete Namlook, namely Alien Community #1 (Fax, 1993) and Alien Community #2 (Fax, 1994); the collaboration with Bill Laswell, Visitation (Subharmonic, 1994); the two volumes of Wechselspannung (Fax, 1994), again with Namlook; Electro Harmonix (Fax, 1994) with Tetsu Inoue; Reagenz (Source, 1994), a duo with Deep Space Network.

Sharp's most celebrated project, Spacetime Continuum, was born with the EP Fluorescence (Reflective, 1993) and soon established itself within the ambient-house movement. Sea Biscuit (Astralwerks, 1994) is the 70-minute seven-track tour de force that turned this clothes designer into a disco wizard. His compositions display a psychodramatic tension that transcends ambient music. Pressure is translucent cosmic music for electronic keyboards that borders on new-age music. The melodic fantasia opens with a celestial motif of cascading notes that drives the techno beat.
Rhythm is virtually absent in Floatilla, a similar composition for floating electronics and psychedelic distortions.
The mood swings can be wild. Subway is a concerto for subliminal dissonances that harks back to early Pink Floyd, the electronic avantgarde of the 1960s, the gothic/industrial pieces of Throbbing Gristle Here Sharp is at his most cryptic and negative. Voice Of The Earth is a complex fresco that mixes natural sounds, watery synths and weak percussions. The music can turn into a subtle and sophisticated game of textures, as in Ping Pong, and reaches nirvana in the closing A Low Frequency Inversion Field, an abstract pastiche of melodic filaments, cacophonic effects, loose beats and galactic drones. The celestial mood of the beginning has plunged into the black hole of the soul.
The polished production, the cromatic arrangements and the organic flow of sound recalls A HREF=ozric.html>Ozric Tentacles' progressive-rock rather than the masters of techno.

Like too many British electronic musicians of his age, Sharp seems to run after every new fad. Emit Ecaps (Astralwerks, 1996) marks his conversion to jungle, but, if nothing else, it does so with style and imagination. If several tracks are mere dance "locomotives" (Vertigo), Iform and Out Here are heaps of sounds that hint to a baroque form of electronic collage. Sharp excels at warping the melody of a song, so that it becomes part of the rhythm, as in the deconstructed latin tune of Swing Fantasy, or the layered themes of Pod, or the mechanical tinkling of String Of Pearls, that sounds like an accelerated Harold Budd ambient sound-painting.
The 12-minute Kairo is a complex composition in three parts: first an exercise in minimalist fluctuations and cycles, then a rehearsal of dub, "drum'b'bass" and acid-jazz techniques, and again a minimalist coda. Sharp is undoubtedly one of the most cunning intellectuals of modern dance music, capable of manipulating his age's sonic stereotypes and abstracting them into sonic fantasias of an almost classical elegance.
The Space Continuum project seems doomed to disappear and make room for the more pretentious works published under his own name.

rEmit rEcaps (Astralwerks, 1996) is the remix album.

Spacetime Continuum resurfaced with Double Fine Zone (Astralwerks, 1999), a work that mostly (The Ring, Beveled Edge, Freezone, Manaka) harks back to Sharp's studies of jazz (thanks to saxophonist Brian Iddenden), although Spin-Out still targets the techno discos and the surreal cubistic pastiches of Microjam and Biscuit Face nod at Autechre.