SETI (band)

Infobox musical artist
Name = SETI


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Origin = New York City
Genre = Ambient Experimental
Years_active = 1993-1996
Label = Instinct Records
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Current_members = Savvas Ysatis Taylor Deupree
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SETI is an ambient electronic band, which is a collaboration of Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree (also credited as Taylor808). They formed in 1993 in New York.

The term S.E.T.I. stands for "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence." This topic is the inspiration for and the central theme of the band's music.

Their music is ambient, with few songs containing readily apparent rhythms (those with rhythm tend towards the trip-hop/ambient-IDM genres). The mood of the music is pervasively mysterious, grandiose and occasionally spooky; the sounds used are expansive, even alien in nature. Some songs could be considered noise music, as they include white noise and samples from radio telescopes scanning deep space (such as pulsars, radiation, supernovae and other astronomical phenomena). Many other sounds give the impressions of quiet computers, signals travelling immense distances, garbled radio transmissions and electrical energies. The net effect of the music is that the listener feels transported to the deep recesses of space, or feels he/she is listening to sounds, transmissions or events in deep space. Also heard on the "Pharos" album is a speech given by Frank Drake, one-time president of the S.E.T.I. Institute and creator of the Drake Equation, which describes the S.E.T.I. project.

The liner notes of their albums often feature reprints of material from the various SETI projects around the world, or short essays by prominent SETI personnel.

Discography

* "SETI" (1994)
* "Pharos" (1995)
* "Ciphers" (1996)
* "Pod" (2000)