To the left is guitarist Dave Beegle, standing in front of a stack of Marshall amplifiers and wailing away at a guitar riff until it practically picks him up off his feet.

To the right is bassist Fred Babich, who first makes the room rumble with the snap of his fingers over the strings, then adds full power chords to flesh out the body of the song.

In the middle is drummer Dave Spurr, who nails the heavy rock beat while spraying a barrage of percussion across the top of it.

This is the power rock fusion trio Fourth Estate, and even though this is only a rehearsal, the group is whipping up an electric storm of challenging original music.

The rehearsals are for an eight-date Colorado-Wyoming tour the band is undertaking to celebrate the release of Fourth Estate's new album, See What I See, on Hapi Skratch Records label.

It has been three years since the release of the band's excellent debut CD, Finesse and Fury, and the arrival of the new record is going to provoke plenty of celebration among the group's fans.

"After finishing the new album, and then listening back to the first one, the band's growth became really clear. The new music is more emotional, and sonically it's way beyond what we were doing then," Beegle said in a group interview during a recent rehearsal break.

Finesse and Fury rode the thin, sharp line between technique and expression with a unique flair and confident control. See What I See, however, goes far beyond with a music that not only pushes the envelope of where rock guitar can go, but it also leaves a deeper, richer impression.

The music is cinematic and thematic in the sense of creating musical soundscapes. An analogy would be with classical music that creates a mood and allows the listener to imagine things for themselves. "We'd like to think that we're doing the same thing in the rock spectrum," Babich said.

A big part of the band's new sound comes from Beegle's association with the DTS-1 guitar invention created and manufactured by Fort Collins company TransPerformance. The DTS-1 is a programmable device that runs a standard guitar into an instrument with nearly infinite tuning possibilities.

Beegle and fourth Estate have been demonstrating the DTS-1 for TransPerformance for years and were the first band to use the device on a recording.

What (the DTS-1) actually does is orchestrate the guitar. It makes its range much broader than an guitar left in one tuning. It expands the sound of the guitar," Beegle said.

On See What I See, the influence of the DTS-1, the skills of three talented musicians and the echoes of world music that affected the group on a recent tour in Eastern Europe all come together in a powerful and fiery way in the three-part suite "Kara Kum."

The wild excess of rock electricity meets the mysterious depth of primal melodies and rhythms for a tour de force of instrumental creative music.

All this puts Fourth Estate in the forefront of rock innovation, which is exactly where they want to be.

"When I sit and play the record for people, I'm proud of the fact that we're on the cutting edge," Spurr said.

Beegle recently filmed a segment of the television program "Beyond 2000," which will be focusing on the DTS-1. Meanwhile, Fourth Estate will be at the Docks on Saturday.

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