Twisted Schallplatten & CDs

Review: In a first-time collaboration, psychedelic trance godhead Simon Posford (best known as Hallucinogen and a founding member of Shpongle) teams up with fellow hippie and flutist Raja Ram (Ronald Rothfield) on a welling improvisatory record, Improvisations For Piano And Flute. Though both are highly esteemed artists in their respective micro-corners of the electronic music scene, Posford and Rothfield both depart significantly from their usually danceable ends for a living-room recorded set of ambiences. With a synth placed atop an antique Bluthner piano, Raj and Simon would join in after the other first begun playing, delivering a 44-minute effluence for the spontaneous soul.

Review: What goes around, comes around, at least when it comes to dance music culture. The rise in new productions informed by early psy-trance and hallucinatory ambient techno jams has led to a swathe of reissues of long-forgotten releases from the 1990s. Here's another, and a chance to cop London outfit Shpongle's 1998 debut album, Are You Shpongled. As an LP, it's very much of its time, with the pair brilliantly blurring the boundaries between spacey ambient, dub, chill out room-ready downtempo grooves, intergalactic-sounding drum & bass, flute-sporting soundscapes and the kind of bustling rhythms and shroom-fuelled electronics that were once the preserve of new age travellers in brightly coloured trousers and slightly damp woolly hats.

Review: British psy-trance oddity Sphongle have been traversing the highways and byways of transcendental music culture since the late 90s, and they remain as adored within the scene as ever. Their third album, Nothing Lasts - But Nothing Is Lost is considered one of their great opuses - a twisting and turning fever dream of exotic passages, mind-warping synthesis and lysergic grooves from the studios and brains of Simon Posford and Raja Ram. Split into 20 tracks, but supposedly formed of eight phases in a cohesive dream sequence, it's the ultimate trip, and it's finally getting a repress on vinyl via Posford's legendary Twisted Records, one of the true bastions of psy-trance culture.

Review: Sphongle continue to gift their fans with these exquisite reissues of their illustrious catalogue, catching up to more recent times with the richly dynamic sound of Museum Of Consciousness. This 2013 epic leant in on every dimension of Simon Ponsford and Raja Ram's sound, at once bristling with kinetic electronica energy while keeping their much-loved mysticism front and centre. It's a trip, like a Sphongle album should be, but it's also got a certain bite which more than stands up to the rigours of the modern dancefloor. One of the group's great skills has been in moving with the times while staying true to a certain deep-rooted, festival-friendly playfulness. Grab a slice of cosmic delight, freshly remastered for your brain to happily feast on.

Review: The twin 'electronic' album to the supposedly 'acoustic' album that came before, Vaccine Electronic is Younger Brother's eight-track compendium of electronic versions of the 2011 album 'Vaccine', released three years later. Packed with may a psytrance meltdown and crystalline glitch-freaks - as if our ears had just been injected with a new experimental psilocyboid - choice tracks such as 'Night Led Me Astray Electronic' lay especial claim to Posford and Vaughan's mammoth production skill, in contrast to their matchable songwriting ability as defined on the earlier album.