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Sound Tribe Sector 9

Sound Tribe Sector 9, or STS9 for short, is a 5 piece band that originally hails from Snellville, Georgia and after much success in Athens, GA and Atlanta, moved out west in late 2000 and currently reside in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.

The band is known for frequent and explosive live performances with a friendly atmosphere and lots of dancing. Their music combines a special blend of the Atlanta influenced hip-hop side while combining it with a electronica-jam feel. The band is also known for their affinity for the Maya calendar, or "13 moon calendar". Onstage, the band blends live instrumentation using Ableton Live via Apple powerbooks.

Emancipator

A sleeping giant of the electronic music world, Douglas Appling - more commonly known as Emancipator - has quietly established himself as a mainstay in the electronic music scene since the release of his debut album, Soon It Will Be Cold Enough in 2006. Classically-trained as a violinist from an early age, Appling's organic approach to electronic music production draws inspiration from a wide range of international cultures and musical genres, culminating in a refreshingly authentic brand of electronic music that has infiltrated global consciousness.

2017 was a busy year of touring & music writing for Emancipator. Doug’s live band, Emancipator Ensemble, headlined Red Rocks Amphitheater for the first time and made appearances at many music festivals across the globe.

November 2017 also marked the release of the much-anticipated new Emancipator album, Baralku, via his own label, Loci Records. Inspired by the astral “island” some aboriginal societies believe to be our spiritual home after death, Baralku synthesizes downtempo hip-hop beats, world music elements, and field recordings, as well as jazz, folk, and classical influences into a transcendent hybrid of lush, nuanced, and ethereal compositions.

“Music takes me to places, and each song is a spirit island on which its soul lives infinitely,” says Emancipator of the album’s title and his inspiration. “To release a song is both a death and a birth at the same time,” he adds. “The sounds contained in each song have reached the end of their life process. The once shapeshifting collage of expression has been crystallized into a final form, no longer kinetic. Yet it exists in a state of permanent potential energy, waiting to be accessed in the form of music, just as the memory of a departed soul will always have the power to move us.”

Following the release of Baralku, the Emancipator Ensemble will embark on a 25-date North American tour in early 2018.

http://www.emancipatormusic.com

Skream

London-based producer/DJ Skream (Ollie Jones) is a master of numerous forms of bass-heavy dance music. He played a vital role in the development and popularity of dubstep during the 2000s, and subsequently branched out toward techno, disco, drum'n'bass, and other styles. Following early collaborations with fellow genre pioneers Benga and Loefah, he released one of dubstep's most easily recognizable tracks, "Midnight Request Line," in 2005, which was included on his 2006 full-length Skream!, one of dubstep's earliest albums. His tracks and remixes helped shift the genre from being a darker, more minimalist form of club music to something more melodic and accessible, paving the way for its mainstream popularity by the beginning of the 2010s. Skream's biggest commercial success was his involvement as part of the dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man (with Benga and Artwork), whose self-titled debut album reached number one on the U.K. dance chart in 2010. However, while primarily associated with dubstep, Skream has never limited himself to one genre, and much of his work since the mid-2010s has explored house and techno. DJ sets such as 2018's Fabriclive 96 are smooth, propulsive mixtures of tech-house and electro, and single releases like 2014's "Bang That" and 2021's "Chester's Groove" generally provide heavy club ammunition. 2023's Skreamizm 8, a full-length edition of his long-running series, features breakbeat-heavy progressive house. Remixes of songs by Eliza Rose and Charli xcx appeared in 2024. Ollie Jones had the good fortune to be working at the Big Apple record store when he first started making beats at age 15 and armed with a cracked copy of the Fruity Loops music-making software. Big Apple was at the center of the early development of U.K. garage's dark, half-speed offshoot dubstep before it was even called dubstep, and it was at Big Apple that Jones, who recorded as Skream, met fellow beatsmiths Benga and Hatcha. Hatcha was a DJ at the seminal club Forward and was only too happy to debut the dubplates of both Skream and Benga's early recordings. Their music took the tension-and-release formula of dance music, removed the release, and layered in more tension instead. With slow and pounding basslines and wobbly treble, they were creating a kind of music that summoned and summed up feelings of urban paranoia, but in an enjoyable way. Emphasizing the sub-bass made them popular with clubbers, but they were also popular with bloggers. Championed and spread by word of mouth on the Internet, Skream went straight from being a name in Croydon to being known around the world. When the owner of Big Apple founded a label to give a home to tracks by dubstep artists, Skream was one of those who released material on it. Other early Skream singles appeared on Ital, Tectonic, and Tempa, who issued his breakout classic tra

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