Atlanta's Sound Tribe Sector 9 have built an eclectic fanbase by mixing organic Funk and Soul with their electronic-based experimental side.

"We really feel like Artifact is the first record we've put out," says Sound Tribe Sector 9 bassist David Murphy about the band's fourth studio album. "It was a different process of songwriting for us. We wrote the songs as we developed them, and there's a lot of production to all the tracks. We paid attention to the flow of the album and that everything and every sound was there for a reason."

If that was STS9's intention from the outset, then the Atlanta quintet nailed their goal with laser-guided precision. Artifact is a rich and expansively arranged album and yet it never sounds fussy or overworked, an amazing accomplishment considering that it touches on nearly every genre that STS9 works within -- Jazz, Soul, Funk, Fusion, Rock, Trip Hop and ambience are all woven seamlessly into the band's total sonic presentation.

It's this all-encompassing view of music that's won STS9 fans in the Jam community and across all of the genres they represent, as well as earning them opening slots for Perry Farrell, James Brown, Tortoise, LTJ Bukem, Ozomatli and The Roots, an incredible range of artists that speaks volumes about the universality and broad appeal of their work.

One of STS9's most fascinating studio techniques on Artifact consisted of recording passages organically utilizing traditional instrumentation and then fashioning a new sonic structure with the addition of samples, loops and computer manipulation.

STS9 rises above other similarly beat-driven faux-Jazz projects by humanizing the technology and using the computer aspects of the production process as a compositional tool rather than as a tacked-on afterthought. By integrating their traditional musical means with the cutting-edge advances in the field, Sound Tribe Sector 9 has created an incredibly warm and passionate soundscape by way of methodology that often produces the exact opposite effect.

"(Guitarist) Hunter (Brown) would bring me a new arrangement and I would track my bass over it," says Murphy. "Then we'd find the good sections and either copy/paste and build an actual bass line out of it or we'd put the good bass licks into a sampler and then play it back with a sampler. In the track 'Tokyo,' a lot of the guitar work was done in that process. Hunter would record slide guitar and a couple of guitar licks and then play them back on a keyboard."

Perhaps the biggest shift for STS9 on Artifact is the amount of time the band spent on the album. Although a good deal of touring was laced into the timeline, the band worked on the album for nearly a year and a half.

"The first four or five months was a lot of recording and trying to pull together the sounds and structures and formats we were feeling," says Murphy. "The rest of the time was really digging into them and putting a lot of attention into each track. We wanted to take the time to put out a record that we were proud of and that we enjoyed. And it feels good to have been done with it for five months and to still really enjoy this record."

Combining organic live recording with sampling and an intense approach to layering and structuring, STS9 has fashioned a studio tactic they describe as "sonic sculpture." It's an apt description, although "sonic collage" could be equally appropriate terminology.

"We do so many live shows, and we have that opportunity so much to just get up and be free in the moment and to play something you don't have to be attached to," Murphy says. "The 'sculpture' in that was being able to find that and make sure that everything was right and just fit. It was by far the most fun that we've had yet. We all grew as a band and as a collective of people working together. We've found the hardest thing to do in putting together records is coming together and saying, 'We all like that. We can all agree that that's complete and we like the direction that that's going.' "

That consensus might be tricky to accomplish simply by virtue of the wide spectrum of musical interests that each member of STS9 brings to the band. Regardless of the musical differences among the members of Sound Tribe Sector 9, it's the chemistry between them that allows them to hammer together so many disparate genres into their singular sound.

STS9 is proof positive that technology and soul can work together in a single musical form without sacrificing the personality of either in the process.

"Everybody brings their uniqueness to it, and I think that's what keeps a lot of those flavors in our music," Murphy says. "We're all tapped into the same vein of what we're listening to at the time or what bands we're checking out. At the same time, everybody's in a little different pocket of that.

"A lot of the Funk and Soul comes from being from Atlanta and the South and being exposed to a lot of Gospel and Soul growing up. The experimental side comes from always searching for new artists and new sounds and new instrumentation and new avenues of creating sounds that no one's creating yet."