Caught Shpongle last night.

Simon Postford's work has always been among my favorites; his album "The Lone Deranger" as Hallucinogen is an absurdly brilliant and essential psytrance album. His immense, deep breadth of influences and unbelievably complete knowledge of music theory and world music experiences oozes all over this album, as he deftly merges psychedelic and trance elements with musical influences including latin, african, asian, european, native american... definitely a treat for someone like me who appreciates musicians who push the envelopes and transcend genre. As Hallucinogen, he also explores intricate, gradual time changes (listen to the beat changes in Jiggle of the Sphinx from about 4:10-5:30...) which have this incredible psychedelic effect on even a sober mind - it's really quite cool.

As Shpongle, his tracks definitely lean more towards the world music influences than perhaps the hard psytrance elements that I adore in the Hallucinogen project - much to my dismay, actually. I respect, but don't necessarily always love his Shpongle output. I've caught his dj sets as Shpongle or simply Simon Postford before, and was impressed... but this show was just far more intense, and leaned much more towards the hard, dark, pulsing edges of psytrance that I truly love to experience. Essentially, this was more to the Hallucinogen tilt than Shpongle, which was exactly what I was hoping for. The crowd danced, rapt as he guided us on a real, tangible journey; some certainly less enhanced than others in the crowd, but everyone along for the ride.

And, well, he had the new "Shpongletron" video setup seen here -

...this was much cooler in real life; this beast is Zebbler's (of Boston's Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare fame) creation, and it was quite the centerpiece.

All in all, quite the show.