Simon Posford was already an international star in the electronic world when he played a revitalized Camp Bisco for the first time in 2005, though success in the States had continually eluded him. Based in the United Kingdom, his various projects helped introduce the psytrance genre to thousands of music fans across Europe and the Middle East looking for a darker, more psychedelic twist on ‘90s dance music. After making his first Camp Bisco appearance in his Goa trance solo project Hallucinogen, Posford found his biggest footing in the United States outside the electronic underground and now even considers the U.S. a primary market. As his friendship with the members of the Disco Biscuits has deepened, he’s brought over his seminal psytrance project with Raja Ram named Shpongle, his electronic duo with Benji Vaughan called Younger Brother and a range of acts on his Twisted Records label. He’s also formed a Younger Brother live band—featuring Vaughan, singer Ru Campbell, Brothers Past guitarist Tom Hamilton, Duo drummer Joe Russo and Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein—and plans to release a new Younger Brother album featuring the jamband titans later this year.
While jetting back across the pond to see his girlfriend in LA, Posford also completed a new Shpongle album Ineffable Mysteries From Shpongleland, which was released in late 2009. Below, Posford talks about his upcoming Shpomgle tour, meeting the Disco Biscuits and what he did to make his “alien sounds make sense.”
It is always a challenge for an electronic artist to create a live show faithful to an album. Can you start by talking a bit about your current Shpongle live show and how you plan to tour this material in the U.S.?
It’s sort of a multi-layered sound in the studio and to try and recreate that at a gig is a very interesting challenge for me. I prefer to do it as a band but, obviously, logistically to bring twelve fantastic working musicians over and get them all on the same schedule and to be able to afford the money for them to fly out is quite a hard thing to do. No one from the States has stepped up to do it, so these shows will be Shpongle DJ sets.
We just finished the new album Ineffable Mysteries From Shpongleland, so we’ll be playing a lot from that. [Younger Brother’s Benji Vaughan] is on a lot of the dates as well, so we might do a few Younger Brother DJ sets during the tour. But in terms of the Shpongle DJ show, I’ll just be mixing like a regular DJ. We’re bringing a video VJ guy, and some dance performers, and visual performers as well. I don’t really want to say it should be druggy, but it should be mentally stimulating, as well as sonically stimulating too.
You’re great at multi-tasking in the studio and recently worked on a number of studio projects, including the new Shpongle record, a new Younger Brother album, the new Disco Biscuits album and others. Can you bring us back to when you first started working on Ineffable Mysteries From Shpongleland?
It seemed like a very slow process because we started it maybe two years ago— maybe even more. It’s not actually that we spent two years making it—we just did a lot in-between recordings. Raj has a number of different projects and is on tour. I’m on tour, playing with Younger Brother and Hallucinogen. So, for the actual process, we normally spend a week making a tune—sometimes two weeks with the longer ones. It seems as the technology increases, it means that you can do more, so the tunes can get more complex, and really the only limit now is your imagination.
However, that just means there are so many more possibilities. The first album we did was on an Atari, with a sampler and a few dubs. In those days it was two to three days a tune, where as now the possibilities are so vast that it takes much longer to create a song. When we get together we’ll do a week or two weeks. We might have an idea or a sample or something we want to use. We started off this album with an Indian track—I just got back from India and while I was out there I had a little handheld Zoom recorder that records to SIM cards. I would go around villages recording musicians and singers. So I came back to London armed with all this fabulous stuff I recorded. So we started with that idea and it inspired us to start our first track.
I recently got into Music for Eighteen Musicians by Steve Reich, a classic piece. And so I was quite into that and listened to it a lot when I was in the States driving around which was quite nice—it was very trancey. So we also wanted to do something very Steve Reich-inspired on the new album and brought in a cello virtuoso to do some overdubs. And then the process of sitting in the studio—listening to it over and over—I get quite bored quite quickly, and so I guess that’s why the music never really stays in one zone or stays in one area for too long. The music is an evolving journey, and continually morphing, and different layers coming in and out.
It sounds like modern technology has really allowed you to be a backpack producer in a sense—recording on the fly and using those as the basis of your more proper records.
It is a lot better. In the old days, if you wanted an Indian vocal you’d have to use a sample CD or something like that. I have these sample CDs that I used in the past. It sort of bites you in the ass when you then hear a lead vocal or something you used in your tune, and you hear it in someone else’s shitty tune—in an advertisement of something. It’s sort of quite depressing as an artist. For this album we resolved not to use any sample CDs—or any stuff other people had pre-recorded.
Speaking of world traveling, though you have been a star throughout Europe and the Middle East, it is only recently that your music poked into the mainstream in the United States. How have you felt the electronic and trance scenes over here change in the past five years?
It has definitely changed. I have been involved in the trance scene for years. It’s always been very underground in the States, I hardly had any gigs there, whereas now it’s probably my main market in a way. I come there several times each years and my bigger tours are in the States. I am amazed to be going to places I have never heard of or had never been like Knoxville Tennessee, for example. And I am amazed to turn up there and find Shpongle fans there. Same with Wakarusa in Arkansas. If you watch the news or read popular myth, you’d think these are backwards country hick-y place. But there are Shpongle fans there and people who are quite clued into electronic music and the electronic scene. And I think in the jamband scene you got people like STS9 and people incorporating more electronics—and even the Disco Biscuits incorporating more electronic sounds into their music. That’s definitely opened the door for people like me to come and play over here.
The first time you played Camp Bisco was in 2005. In that time you have become good friends with the members of that band and played with a number of other bands associated with the jamband scene. Were you familiar with the Disco Biscuits’ music before playing that initial Camp Bisco?
Not so much, no. I hadn’t come across their music, though we had mutual friends so I sort of knew of them, but I didn’t really know much about them until I got there. It was only when I got there that I realized this is our crowd: a psychedelic crowd who really loves music. And I think at first event then, they didn’t quite get the electronics so much. They seem much more receptive to it now, the last time we played.
I hated electronic music as well when I was a teenager. I couldn’t hear the soul in it or the human element or anything I wanted to hear in it. But when you take drugs, it really changes everything, and suddenly these really alien sounds make sense. There’s only so much you can do with a guitar and a conventional band lineup. Whereas once you start incorporating electronic sounds you can get really other worldly alien textures and soundscapes you can’t achieve otherwise. It was a fabulous scene, and the Disco Biscuit guys are just such nice guys, I really adore them, they’re so sweet, and we had such a blast and we became really good friends.
When I heard people in the States term psychedelic music to me it was more stuff like the Grateful Dead. To me it didn’t sound psychedelic, I never really got it because I never went to a show. I hear it’s all about the show and when they play it live and how they stretch out the guitar solos, or whatever, and it becomes psychedelic. Really it’s such a similar crowd because they appreciate psychedelics and mind expansion, and they seem to be a very musical crowd as well. So it’s weird that the paths haven’t interwoven and crossed more, actually.
From an outside perspective, it’s been interesting to watch your relationship evolve. Your first year you did your set, they did their set, then in 2006 you sat in with them for a song and by 2007 you had formed a band featuring members of the Disco Biscuits.
At the end of the day we’re all musicians, and we all have such a love of music and to be able to jam with each other and play music and listen to music together—that’s really what it’s all about. There’s never been any preconceived plan—like we should do this, let’s make a band with Brownie and this and that. It’s more like, “Let’s have a jam and let’s play some music together.”
In Europe, from what I can tell, the jamband scene is tiny. I mean the Biscuits, I don’t know any of my friends apart from those who went to universities in the States, for example, have even heard of them. And there’s not really a jamband scene here other than the Ozric Tentacles. Over here there was a big festival culture in the late ‘80s and early-‘90s but that is sort of done over here [as far the electronic scene is concerned]. Now they are called the New Age Travelers, they used to just be called the Travelers’ scene. It’s people that live in busses and, I guess, they’re descendants of the Merry Pranksters. They’d be squatting a site somewhere, a field in the country, and they’d live there until they got moved on by the police and they would have a big party, and there would be this festival scene. Then it all sort of came to an end in England with the Castlemorton festival where suddenly 20,000 people descended on this quiet village in the English countryside, and the residents had an absolute shit fit. And suddenly there’s all these kids wandering around, music is going all night, people are having fun and obviously that got frowned upon. It got outlawed, and so now there’s no real free party scene so much—it’s really gone underground again. And even the equivalent rock festivals like Glastonbury Festival, which started to raise money for C.N.D. and Green Peace, is now a huge corporate thing with Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as Paul McCartney headlining.
You touched upon some of your other projects earlier. What is the status of the Younger Brother album, which features your live band (Marc Brownstein, Joe Russo and Tom Hamilton)?
We’re aiming for release this year. In these times, with downloads, it’s hard to make money off of album sales, so we’re trying to find someone to release it or an investor to put money into it because we basically just indulged our fantasies—and got Joe Russo to come over and play drums. Getting all these American guys to come over here and record in the studio is expensive. Joe Russo, I have to say, is my hero. He’s just a phenomenal musician—he really is. His drumming is outstanding, but not only that, he’s better than everyone in the band at all their instruments. No matter what you tell him about a song, he knows exactly what you’re talking about.
There’s one time that always continues to amaze me. We did a session in Philadelphia, and we went to the studio for a day. Russo had his wisdom teeth removed in the morning, and turned up at the studio with a head like a hamster, full of Vicodin or some painkillers. We’d written this song in 9/8, which is a tricky signature, and the band was still trying to figure out the arrangement. I run through the arrangement with him, and I started with the guitar part I came up with. So I run it through with Russo, and he said I have to go in an hour—let me just put down, just the drums. So even without the band playing, he played to a click track in his ear, which was in 4/4, and he played this 9/8 tune—all while on painkillers. It’s quite a complex tune, the difference between the 9/8 and 4/4, and he just fucking nailed the whole thing with a 4/4 click track and nothing else playing. Meanwhile, the whole rest of the band is scratching their heads trying to figure out how to play this song.
He’s actually playing in a Grateful Dead offshoot band called Furthur now.
Mickey Hart is a fabulous drummer as well. I don’t know much about the Grateful Dead spin-off bands, but Mickey Hart—that’s some serious shoes to fill. If anyone can do it, fucking Russo can.
Did you always envision Younger Brother as a live band?
All this stuff started…when we were young, the technology really wasn’t available to do it as a band, unless you had a record deal and access to a big expensive studio. And then the technology became available to make electronic music at home with a 1 meg Atari computer, which seemed huge at the time. We had samplers and stuff, so we made electronic music. Now the technology is available to sound like a band in your own studio. So it never really started as a band. Benji and I were asked to do a thing for charity…so we did this track and it was for indigenous tribes around the world. Ours was the Kogi Tribe and they live a sort of lifestyle where they see themselves as protectors of the planet. They call themselves Elder Brother, and the rest of the world is Younger Brother. It’s one of the few ecosystems where they have a full ecosystem—from the coast to high mountains to the jungle, and they spend their days making offerings and sort of protect the planet. They saw something was happening, the water was changing, and something was up. Up until this point, if you bumped into them they didn’t speak Spanish, they didn’t really engage with foreigners. So they sent someone out to learn Spanish or English and communicate with the world and say, “What are you doing with your machines. The water is drying up, something’s happening.”
So anyway, we had to do a track for Survival International for that benefit and that’s why we chose the name Younger Brother, and “Evil and Harm” was the track. We used it in this documentary about them, a BBC documentary, and it was sort of electronic. But only really when the technology came along to do a band sounding thing at home, did it turn into a band-y sounding project. I’ve always been able to play drums, bass guitar, and traditional instruments but it’s always been easier to use a sampler—and use electronic samples, but now I can setup a kit in my living room and record it.
Was Marc the first person you approached to play the songs live?
I can’t remember why we did it. It was probably the fact that coming to Camp Bisco and playing a laptop set, like a traditional DJ amongst all these jambands where people are actually doing it live, thinking what the fuck are we doing, why don’t we just do it live. Also, you know, the technology becomes available to make it sound like a band at home, so playing that as a DJ thing just looks a bit weird when it sounds like a band—you’re playing with laptops, so Brownie was sort of our hook up. We didn’t know any musicians in the States, and it was too expensive to fly people over from here, so Brownie said initially suggested initially Zach Velmer from STS9 to play drums and he couldn’t do it. But we saw Russo play in The Duo at that Camp Bisco and we were like, “What about that guy who played, you know, in that band where there are just a drummer and a keyboardist and the drummer was amazing.” And he was friends with Tommy Hamilton, and we got him in as well. I didn’t really know any of these bands, just sort of wandered around Camp Bisco and Brownie hooked us up with these musicians.
