STS9 Discover 'Spy Bunker' in Big Sur

On album, STS9 (aka Sound Tribe Sector Nine) generally let the music do the talking. The trance-rockers usually throw down instrumental grooves and let their melodies take the long, winding road to transcendence. But behind the scenes, STS9 offer their fans more than just a chance to break out their visors and glowsticks. Vocal environmentalists and activists that tend to lead by example, they also have some pretty strange beliefs and practices -- some of it rumor, some of it fact, all of it blog-worthy.

For starters, it's true that they've toured in accordance with the Mayan calendar. Their latest space oddity began while recording tracks for what would become their new release, 'Ad Explorata,' in their hometown of Santa Cruz, Calif. earlier this year. The band started to pick up strange signals and voices on their shortwave radio. They distinctly heard the sound of a woman's voice, reading off numbers. If it sounds creepy already, just wait. The band did some research and concluded that they had stumbled upon a "numbers station" -- cryptic messages thought to be used by governments to send codes to spies and other agents. They knew it would make for some choice samples for the album but they couldn't just leave it at that.

Almost predictably, STS9 became obsessed with the station and the strange voice reading off strange numbers. It's not hard to imagine that STS9 might have some pretty geeky friends and one such hacker figured out that the numbers were coordinates pointing to nearby Big Sur. Needless to say, the band put down their instruments for a field trip. Sure enough, they found the bunker they were looking for. Of all their strange findings inside (yes, they trespassed), the most intriguing item to them was a symbol they found sewn on a patch.

In a statement to the press, STS9 says the following about the patch and, of course, how it plays into their new album: "It had this physically impossible symbol on it that looked futuristic next to all of the older documents. It's the symbol we lay over top of every image you will see for the album. In doing some research, we later found an old book of 'black ops' military patches at the Prelinger Library that had a brief description of this patch. It was thought to be for a secret unit that first used satellites to gather SIGINT (signal intelligence) from other countries during the Cold War. The story is that this team actually gathered signals from another civilization in our galaxy. Their motto was 'Ad Explorata, Forward into the Unexplored'."

The odd thing is, we believe them. As for the album, 'Ad Explorata,' it, too, sounds like it may just come from another part of the galaxy. Cosmic, dude. Meanwhile, back in the Milky Way, STS9 will continue touring across North America, performing their annual New Year's Eve run, this time in Denver, Colo. They will then enter 2010 by leading another kind of adventure altogether as headliners on this year's Jam Cruise. As such, they will visit Jamaica and the Caymans by day, while jamming on the ship by night. As they sail into tomorrow, are they worried about all the Mayan calendar theory that the world will end in 2012? "We talk about it sometimes," guitarist Hunter Brown tells Spinner. "We're building our bunker. We'll be ready." Is he joking? Is he?