On her debut album for Past Inside The Present, Lela Amparo reaches beyond her accomplished ambient guitar work to create a sonic environment that incorporates a vast array of elements, including IDM and Trip-hop rhythms, sweeping orchestral arrangements, and understated, poetic vocals. Keep Your Soul Young is built on a confident rawness and worldliness, influenced by Amparo’s upbringing in the American Southwest, subsequent years of international travel, and a life-changing love that led to her current home in Gothenburg, Sweden. Across its ten pieces, she offers a rare combination of cinematic grandeur and withdrawn, tender grace, brimming with gorgeous melodies and head-nodding drum programming.

Opener, “Space Us Out”, enters on a swell of synthesized strings and gripping low end kick pattern, immediately summoning a city-sized emotional pull. Its beat comes into focus alongside a beautiful piano loop, while other melodic elements and voice samples drift in and out of the foreground, creating the uncanny feeling of waking up in orbit. “You Say You Love” comprises harp, choral voices, and other carefully treated sounds that flicker across the landscape, carried by a bouncy two-step that pulses and crunches in a way that suits it to the dancefloor as much as to a solitary walk in the deep woods.

“Rose & Honey” floats above a steady bass hum and syncopated keys, while introducing Amparo’s dulcet voice through a spoken word passage based on her time in Tokyo. “From the happiness of the sun and warm weather, to the sadness of isolation, confusion and jet lag,” she says about its origins, “I remember so vividly the honest discussions I had with myself as I wandered various neighborhoods, feeling overjoyed, but also nostalgic, knowing it would all soon become a memory.” “Wrong Thing” sustains this tone through its skittering, Burial-style rhythm, soft melodies and vaporous, pitch-shifted vocals, making for a darkly tinged, propulsive standout.

“Riptides” saw the longest evolution of all the tracks on Keep Your Soul Young: ”I felt torn on how heavy or hopelessly romantic I wanted it to sound,” Amparo says, “then I realized I could do both, but just needed to find a middle ground to introduce each mood.” Fittingly, its extended build leads into a wall-rattling kick, countered by a grainy melody that sparkles through a diffuse cloud of rich ambience. “The Ghost Who Never Moves” combines harp, strings, chimes, and buried vocals, while a steady thump-clack appears intermittently, leaving room for widescreen harmonies and a broad range of lush textures.

The album’s final third concisely demonstrates the impressive depth of Amparo’s stylistic ambition, from the eruption of speaker-hopping rhythms on “Modern Monuments”, to the tantalizing brevity and somber Drum ‘n’ Bass of “Soulmate From The Archive”. Despite being the closing track, “O.K. Corral” employs a kinetic, head-nodding sway and interwoven synth lines that suggest an open end, leaving the same type of deep impression and lasting charm as the travels that inspired these songs.

Keep Your Soul Young is, across its many landscapes and modalities, about remaining at home with yourself, no matter your physical location. As a culmination of her journeys and extensive experimentations – both as a musician and renowned visual artist – Amparo states that “the contrast of places I’ve experienced has made me truly appreciate my roots in retrospect, while also allowing me the ability to carve out a new space in the world, and to feel an essential continuity between the two.”