jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Sound Tribe Sector 9 have thrived on exploring the syncopated territory where electronica meets jam, laying down space-age grooves that still involve an actual band. Live PA sets, in which the members trade their instruments for laptops, are a natural extension of that approach, and STS9 has been performing them for a while–but until Friday night, never in New York.

Studio Mezmor, “the city’s #1 super club” formerly known as Crobar, served as venue for the occasion, creating a nice visual hodgepodge to go along with the music: dreadlocked hippies behind the velvet rope, grim-looking bouncers in dark suits and shades pointing spun-out girls in backless dresses down neon-lit hallways. I saw a marine in dress uniform and on crutches, sexy club kids raving it up on the speaker platforms, and the usual wookies doing the usual finger incantations/acid tracer dance, and a little bit of culture clash unpleasantness resulting in overturned trashcans outside the venue.

Sector 9 is at their best when the music seems to happen without effort or ego (nobody ever takes anything as selfish as a solo), and their setup on Friday enhanced that effect. There were drums, percussion, keyboards and a guitar on stage, but all five members were mostly engaged in button-tweaking, and the music just emerged, crystal-clear and bone-shatteringly deep, from speakers all around the room. You could never be too sure who was responsible for any particular noise. The club’s fog machines pumped fog to good effect but I was bitterly disappointed to see the gigantic disco ball go unused all night.

• Previously: Listening to Sector 9 in Tikal
• Official STS9 Downloads
• Sector 9 Podcast Home
• Latest Podcast (mp3)

Here’s a video of Sector 9 with their regular setup, playing a song called “Aimlessly”

In February of 2005, I was in the Guatemalan jungle, on top of what archaeologists have designated Temple IV in the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, standing next to the chamber where the priest-king used to gobble magic mushrooms. Sound Tribe Sector 9 was playing on the iPod.

You’ve seen the view from Temple IV before: it’s the jungle hideout where the rebels regroup for their attack on the Death Star in Star Wars. Tikal was a city designed specifically to align with the Maya’s advanced astronomical knowledge. Rumor has it Sector 9 arrange their setlists according to the Mayan calendar. At the base of the pyramid, our guide Daniello was waiting with far-out theories about the end of the Long Count on December 21, 2012.

Back in New York (a city specifically designed to allow immigrants to make it to work on time), I played around with a bizarre screenplay called Twenty-Twelve for a couple of weeks. Then there was news of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, and I read Daniel Pinchbeck’s follow-up to Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a daring work that combines personal history with way-out ideas about the nature of time, the emergent noosphere, crop circles, the theories of Rudolf Steiner and Jose Arguelles, and the end of the Mayan Long Count. I shelved Twenty-Twelve.

Tonight I saw Apocalypto, and I’m absolutely dying to tell you what I thought–but Disney embargoed all reviews until the December 8 release, and you know how it is: when the Mouse asks, you don’t refuse–and you definitely wouldn’t want to get Mr. Gibson angry. The most I dare say is this: Apocalypto has nothing to do whatsoever with anything that interested me about Mayan culture in the first place, and Marcy might be wrong about Babel. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll bite my tongue for a week and leave you with some photos from Tikal and a video of Sector 9 playing Tokyo:

I’d love to know what Daniello has to say about Apocalypto.

Apocalypto. Mel Gibson, 2006. (No rating yet.)

• Apocalypto Official Site
• Trailer
• Wikipedia
• Rotten Tomatoes

[tags]sound tribe sector 9, film, mel gibson, maya, mayan calendar, time, guatemala, tikal, youtube, flickr, daniel pinchbeck, tikal, apocalypto, 2012, babel, star wars, quetzalcoatl, noosphere, rudolf steiner, jose arguelles, tokyo, crop cirlces, temple of the jaguar, temple IV, daniello, disney, mickey mouse, embargo, paramount building[/tags]