Shpongle

Shpongle began in 1996, when producer Simon Posford and flautist Raja Ram watched a solar eclipse in India and went home to turn the experience into a twenty-minute track. The project that grew from it became one of the founding acts of psybient, a style that folds Eastern instrumentation, Moroccan drums, flamenco guitar and spoken-word samples into the slow-blooming architecture of psychedelic trance. Posford handles the synthesizers, guitars and studio work; Raja Ram supplies the flute, the concepts and the gloriously unhinged vocal elocutions. The name itself is Raja Ram's coinage, a single word for a kind of euphoria no dictionary had bothered to name. Six albums, two sold-out nights at Red Rocks with a full live band, and a 2026 single that recites a healthy portion of the periodic table later, the duo still sounds like nobody else.