The plight of the modern music ensemble is that it must consider marketability. Will this music sell on the shelves? Often times, if the answer is no, the music ceases to flow forth. Very few and lucky are those who stay true to their art, who do not compromise for the sake of the almighty dollar, and are still able to produce music. At this stage in their career, Satyananda is one of those ensembles.

Perhaps Satyananda has yet to compromise their artistic integrity because they are not yet out of college. Jamie Bright (guitar), Danny Endrei (keyboards), Adam Sturtevant (drums), Ben Das (upright bass), and Lucas Lejeune (violin) are currently all students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, a soil that seemingly fertilizes their every musical taste. For despite their youth, Satyananda is extremely literate in their medium of choice. They are adept at both discussing and playing music that you certainly have never heard of, music from faraway lands where the twelve-note scale is nonexistent and the rock and blues meter is far too simple and overdone to be worthy. Much of their music is characterized by the odd-metered yet absolutely logical patterns of atonal scales known and appreciated by a handful of westerners. Think not the pentatonic Japanese scale where everything harmonizes, but rather think the 18-tone Indian scale, where there is somehow some note in between G and G#. Satyananda's harmonies would make Bach very upset. I would almost say that if it were not for the discrete nature of frets and keys, Satyananda would much prefer to play in a continuous scale where there are no separations between notes.

At the same time, Satyananda splices their eccentric meters and harmonies with a backbone firmly rooted in electronic music. Made possible mostly by Endrei on keyboards and Sturtevant on drums, Satyananda has superimposed their Far Eastern influence on a canvas of jungle and drum n' bass. Here, then, Satyananda falls into step with bands such as the Disco Biscuits and Sound Tribe Sector 9, bands who play instruments that draw heavily from turntable-based music. But unlike the Biscuits and STS9, Satyananda dips into the almost impossible realm of jungle and drum n' bass. Impossible because it is rare that you will find a drummer with hands steady and fast enough to pull off the feat. Sturtevant, however, is one of those drummers. And the choice of jungle and drum n' bass is appropriate, as these two incarnations of electronic music are in their own way equally as frenetic and complex as Satyananda's melodies.

This is indeed an eclectic form of music. Far-eastern melodies and meters splattered over a foundation of jungle? Can it work? Does it sell? Will it go over? These are, of course, not the right questions. Satyananda is certainly not catering to the Backstreet Boys generation, and I don't think their playing will bend to meet even the aficionados of improvisational hippie rock or jazz-funk. For now, these college kids are not relying on ticket sales to pay the bills, and that provides for a great deal of artistic freedom. And they have stayed true to their artistic sense, which equivocally has had positive effects on their support from promoters. Satyananda at the Middle East Downstairs on Saturday night (that in itself being no small feat for a band of college students), along with Liquid Soul, was a Gamelan Productions concert.

On Saturday night at the Middle East, the band took the stage one by one, starting with Endrei on keyboards, adding then the effects-laden sustain of Lejeune on violin, the broad and sweeping strokes of Bright's guitar, and finally a foundation of drums and upright bass. And when the drums and bass hit, the crowd felt it. Even with their compositional intricacy, Satyananda plays loud and hard.

The sound is instantly mesmerizing. If for no other reason, simply watching Satyananda play gives you the impression of a spiritual ceremony. To hear them talk about music might make you think that they were talking about religion. Despite confused noodle-dancers and ravers looking for the downbeat, the crowd was caught up in its fervor. The would-be dancers spent much of their time studying the stage, trying to make sense of the meter and harmony. The duo of hula-hoopers in the back might have had the correct idea: let go of the quarter note pattern of downbeats and concentrate more on the natural flow of the music. Less up and down, more around and around. So Satyananda plays.

The set was plagued with some technical difficulties-a buzzing on the low end was present most of the set, the guitar's foot pedal wiring seemed to fail Bright at points, and the upright bass issued a terrible dose low-end feedback at the beginning of the set. The engineering did not really settle into a comfortable mix until the third song, but once it did the crowd slowly made their way forward to the edge of the stage like pilgrims to a shrine. Even on stage, you will see the band dancing or paying respect and reverence to the music that is coming forth. Lejenune will play motionles with his eyes closed. Endrei dances as much as he plays, and Bright and Das play while swaying gently, as one does while engaged in prayer.

With so much sound coming from the stage, a body could easily get lost. In efforts to anchor myself, I kept coming back to the drums. As most songs were structured the way a jungle mix would be, the drums dictated the tension and release of the music, as well as quick and precise changes and syncopation. Besides that, the drums were unbelievably steady and solid, and at the same time, complex. Sturtevant's kit is deceptively simple. He is nevertheless fully capable of producing rhythms and sounds regularly reserved for computers. And as is the drummer's task to hold things together, Sturtevant excelled at making clear rhythmic patterns amidst strange tones and meters. His prowess shocked me in the live performance, as the drum tracks on Satyananda's CD are not nearly as convincing. Perhaps it was just sheer volume as compared to the CD, but the drumming more and more impressed me as the set moved on. In the more improvisational sections of the set, I thought that the drumming, along with the bass line, actually was the centerpiece, with guitar, violin, and keyboards doing texture work. In this sense, it was much like a jungle track played by a live band. However, the ace up Satyananda's sleeve is that they are able to stop their jungle-influenced grooves on a dime, and switch into a composed arrangement of highly complex music with heavy Far Eastern influences .

So as it stands now, Satyananda makes music that, to me, does not seem marketable on a grand scale, if for no other reason that it is not as danceable as jazz-funk or electronic. The crowd, young and used to being entertained at concerts in a certain way, did not know what to do with the music at certain points. I found the music highly cerebral and meditative, an art form that did not immediately gratify or allow for cheap thrills or payoffs.

This is music not just to be heard, but to be listened to. This is High Art, and demands concentration, thought, and a carefully formed musical palette in order to be fully enjoyed.

Hearing Satyananda made me wish I was more versed in the music that they listened to, both so I could understand where they were coming from and where music could go. They certainly challenged the boundaries of the western scale and standard meter. They added a layer of complexity and possibility to the type of music that one may hear in the great venues of the country. Given the same brushes to paint music as other ensembles, Satyananda comes out with a product evocative of Kandinsky or Gorky-abstract studies in emotion and texture, punctuated with a dense foundation of shapes and colors vaguely recognizable yet novel and fresh. What can be definitely said is that Satyananda's art is their own, and the listener is lucky enough to be privy to its creation, live, on stage.

These college kids will be going home for the summer, but look for them around Boston in the fall when school starts up again. Despite their age, Satyananda's music is anything but college. Paradoxically, college might be exactly what allows Satyananda the artistic freedom to make their music. For the time being,

Satyananda seems to be immune to the need to create a marketable product at the expense of their art. Let us hope that they somehow find a way to keep making their music, uninhibited by the pressures of commercial music, well past their college years.

-David Taus