Shpongle is traditionally composed of two people: Raja Ram and Simon Posford. Simon makes the beats and Raja Ram entertains the crowd with a variety of homemade instruments and his trusty flute. When Shpongle presented the Masquerade, it was simply Simon Posford posted up on stage. He played a two and a half hour set. It was one of the better shows that I have been to; Shpongle is a trip in itself. They like to start the show off by bellowing “Welcome to Shpongleland!”
Posford was mounted up in his psychedelic morphing castle/Amazon tree-house/inferno/bug/alien/monster face/asteroid/galaxy field/tentacle field. This amazing projecting house is a unique creation of paneling that had projectors displaying various images. The overall motif of the command station would change with the particular song he was mixing and each song seemed to have a particular light coordination associated with it.
The range of colours was unbelievable. Shpongle at the Masquerade was a myriad of florescent psychedelic melting dynamic creations that would dance and phase into the next image seamlessly as he would blend songs. Rather fantastic experience especially for such duration.
The set started off slow and built to a wonderful flurry of original psychedelic influenced electronic music guided by none other than the Shpongle director himself. After thirty minutes of getting warmed up and into character, the Shponglemeister is one of the most animated DJs I’ve seen. He would sound and act out the distinctive Shpongle popping sounds or spiral out with the crazy tangents in a song. Whenever there is loud shrieking he would look up and put on a screaming face. He would also lock eye contact with the people in the audience and share moments of experience with them. He caught me with a particularly Shpongled face and it made him chuckle. Multiple moments of experience were shared with the DJ and myself. The same thing was said from my friend who also attended. As we were walking out he mentioned how peculiar it was to have a DJ establish such a distinct bond with someone in the audience.
The entire time Shpongle was playing I was becoming more and more Shpongled. I have been Shpongled. The crowd was just as eccentric as he was dressing up to match the masquerade theme. Simon likes to wear a fancy hat with multiple giant fancy feathers perched on the side.
The crowning moment was when he vanished from his floating Technicolor spaceship and looped “Stay Shpongled.” so it was repeating as if his set was over. He reappeared moments later pooling the audience for requests to play for the last song. Shouting at the top of my lungs during the quiet moment I projected: YOU ARE ME AND I AM YOU.
Doing this once more, he came back and said “I couldn’t make out any of that; however, due to the nature of the fight in the crowd, a reminder is in order.”
Shpongle began to play I Am You. “You are me and I am you, I’ll always be with you.”
I like to think that he heard me and chose to credit a greater meaning. Stay Shpongled.
