STS9 Offers Mystic Sensibility With a Digital Beat

For years there’s been a counterculture boom waiting to happen at the intersection of hippie jam-band fans and digital rave kids. Their fashions may be different, but their respective quests for bliss via trance ‘n’ dance music, community and, uh, augmented brain chemistry are too alike. SoundTribe Sector 9 is one band getting a buzz for staking out that crossroads, and Saturday at Cafe Club Fais Do-Do, it kept a packed house drawn from both camps dancing into the wee hours.

The Georgia-originated quintet, recently relocated to Santa Cruz, offers a curious bit of musical revision. In recent years, many techno DJs and producers have sampled and simulated ‘70s funk-rock and fusion into digital pastiches. STS9 has converted that permutation back into an analog format--digital framework and all. It’s a live band of guitar, keyboards, bass and two percussionists playing long, flowing instrumentals echoing Miles Davis and the spacier side of Santana but often mimicking the clipped repetitions of looped techno drum-and-bass patterns.

An essential attraction to some, especially on the hippie side, is the accompanying quasi-mysticism, with references to Mayan numerology (the “sector 9” of the name) and a low-key spirituality. The scale is balanced by the music’s skittish beats, and there was a lot more twitchy rave-style dancing Saturday than Deadhead twirling.

While the band showed clear strengths and promise, it also had evident limitations, not the least of which is being a band with little stage dynamic playing only long instrumentals. Colorful computer-psychedelic projections help on the former, but sonically it can’t compete with the infinite library elements available to DJs. The danger is that if the group doesn’t make a truly original hybrid from its rich ingredients, the cultural phenomenon sparking around it could prove more interesting than the band is.