Shpongle

• Genre: Psytrance
• Shpongle Website

About

Essential listening for the acid, ambient, psytrance and Burning Man communities, it's not surprising that England's Simon Posford used to record under the name Hallucinogen. Teaming up with ex-Quintessence flautist Raja Ram, tPosford formed Shpongle, a group credited with fashioning a sound that creates "psycho-geometric, atomic telepathic, shimmering, incandescent dream dilations" in the listener. This sort of thing would seem to make them an easy target for those who would bracket the entire genre as the tragic blathering of many a fried mind, but that would ignore the massive production talent and surprising accessibility they both brought to the sound. Their three-album career (Are You Shpongled?(1998), Tales Of The Inexpressible(2001),Nothing Lasts…But Nothing Is Lost(2005))plus a remixer effort is as good an introduction to the psytrance genre as one can get. Avoiding the endless repetitive noodling of some of the more Goa-esque artists in the field, Simon and Raja create real songs and use panoramic production values to enhance the massive breakdowns and frantic beats. The end result is clearly psytrance, but it's quality psytrance, ranking up there with Atmos and Infected Mushroom, and well worth investigating, even if you've never dreamt of going north of 135 BPM in your life.

- Nicholas Baker