STS9- Ad Explorata (1320 Records)
Sound Tribe Sector 9 was founded in the late ‘90s, when their unique brand of dub-influenced, improvisational breakbeats established them as peers of rising jam bands such as Disco Biscuits and Lake Trout. They quickly attracted a national following, and by 2001 they’d relocated to northern California and taken a deeper interest in spirituality and mysticism.
With Ad Explorata, STS9 has also taken an interest in shortwave radios, as the album was inspired by (and features samples of) transmissions found while tooling around with one. They reportedly stumbled onto an artificial female voice counting off numbers, then learned these transmissions came from numbers stations designed to transmit coded messages from government organizations to spies overseas (in 2001 the U.S. tried the Cuban Five for spying using info received from a Cuban station).
Enlisting the help of a crypto-hacker friend, STS9 found that the numbers corresponded with the coordinates of a military installation in Big Sur. Following a trail to an abandoned bunker, they found a rusted metal box containing several items, including the photo that became the cover of their “Atlas” single and a black ops military patch for a unit that gathered signal intelligence from other countries and, perhaps, galaxies. Their motto: “Ad Explorata, Forward Into The Unexplored.”
Whether you believe this extraordinary story or not, it’s hard to argue with the conceptual impact on Ad Explorata’s blend of jazz, funk, IDM, prog rock and spaced-out psychedelia, which creates some of the band’s most dynamic jams to date. From the Aphex Twin-like alien vibe of the opening “Phoneme” and the metallic guitar thrust of “Heavy” to the hypnotic dub groove of “Crypto City” and the tweaked-out glitch-hop of “Central,” this is the deepest, most intriguing effort of STS9’s career. If there is life on other planets, you can only imagine that this might be just the sort of transmission they’d love to hear. (B) –Bret Love
(originally appeared in Georgia Music Magazine)
iv listened to this album for years now and not once did i pick up what the image for the album cover is> Finally i just found it, took my friend some convinving but she finally saw it too. Kudos to the artist, you totally had me fooled but now i see the man in the hat with the bar bracelet and his head and his hands. AMAZING
ReplyDelete<3 Britt and Nina :)--whooooo hooooooo