Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) seem to have no desire to slow down its output of material. Following last year’s Peaceblaster and a remix album to boot, the electronic jam band has returned with its latest record, Ad Explorata. The album is due to drop on December 8th through 1320 Records.
The five-piece group, famous for combining live instruments with electronic music, has posted an entry on the weirdly, offbeat development of its latest project on its website. Basically, the whole process started when keyboardist David Phipps’ daughter messed around with a shortwave radio the band had. The dial stopped on a super low frequency and out from the speaker came an artificial voice of a woman counting off numbers. The STS9 members soon became obsessed with what they had stumbled onto and spent weeks trying to find more voices. They only found one more voice but it proved to be helpful, since it’s sampled in the introduction of the song “Central”.
After a trip down research lane, the band discovered that they were tuning into number stations, thought to be coded messages used by governments to communicate with spies overseas. This information isn’t confirmed by any government, but it was enough to capture STS9’s imagination. They recruited a crypto-hacker friend in an attempt to decode the number sequence they had found. The numbers led them to an old abandoned bunker where they found several photos, one of which is the cover for the single “Atlas”. Also discovered was a symbol of a secret team whose job was to gather signals from another civilization in our galaxy. Their motto was… “Ad Explorata, Forward into the Unexplored”. Talk about going off the beaten path!
Stream the aforementioned “Atlas” below. Find the band’s upcoming tour dates after that.
STS9 Tour Dates:
12/29 – Denver, CO @ June Swaner Gates Concert Hall
12/30 – Denver, CO @ Wells Fargo Theatre
12/31 – Denver, CO @ Wells Fargo Theatre
01/02 – Fort Lauderdale, FL @ Revolution Live
01/03-08 – Caribbean Ocean @ Jam Cruise
