First reason is that Earthcore is an outdoor dance festival. Psytrance was born out of Goa trance that is style of dance music that originated in the Indian coastal resort city in 1980s that was and still is famous for it’s outdoor dance parties that happen in its beaches and forests. Thus psytrance is music made to be enjoyed in the outdoors meaning that Shpongle’s performance at this year’s Earthcore is the act in its natural habitat.
The second reason is that, and this may come as a surprise to some, Raja Ram (who was born Ronald Rothfield) is from Melbourne and he studied music at The Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (now the VCA). Ram is most profoundly heard in Shpongle’s music as a flautist and before that he also played flute in English psychedelic progressive rock band called Quintessence that was signed to Island Records and released five albums from 1969 to 1972.
Ram recounts the tale behind the flute becoming his instrument of choice. “I mean I studied guitar, drums, violin and trombone…I was absolutely useless on all of them. And then one day in Melbourne, it was 1962, I was walking past a little jazz shop in Collins Street and they had this flute coming out the shop window and I was just completely smitten by it. Hearing that sound just changed my life – I don’t remember who was playing it or what they were playing but I just remember thinking ‘this is the coolest instrument ever!”
Okay, so Raja Ram has the instrument that 30 years on would make him regarded as a dance music innovator, but there was still a lot of life experience to occur before Ram would become a psytrance artist.
He picks up his life narrative after graduating from The Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. “After I left Australia I went to New York and studied for a couple of years, then I went to Greece, then I went to London in the late sixties and started Quintessence in ’69 and then I realised ‘we’re making money from this’ and I got contracts with Island Records but it took really quite a long time from beginning my journey in music until my first gig, I was really a late starter not playing my first gig until I was 28 or 29 which these days is unheard of because many artists have retired by 30!
“It was such a fantastic time being London in the 1960s. Quintessence made a lot of albums and did a lot of shows – we did Albert Hall. But that wasn’t satisfying and by 1972 it has really petered out and I gave it all up and I took a regular day job and I thought that was the end of my musical career but it didn’t turn out that way,” states Ram with a knowing smile.
So what ‘day job’ did this visionary and innovative musician take? One might think a teacher, or a writer, or even a lawyer. “I got a job selling envelopes. It’s unbelievable isn’t it. My father got me in contact with this fellow in Denmark who owned a paper mill. I took the job because I had to earn a living because Sastra was just born so I had a straight job for seven years just working for myself from home, the same house I am living in now. We’ve been living in Notting Hill Gate for 48 years.”
So how did an envelope salesman who lived in Notting Hill Gate get switched on to dance music? “In 1982 when I gave up my job selling envelopes I started buying a lot of synthesizers because I really felt that was the direction music was going in but it wasn’t until a friend took me to Goa in 1989 that I heard this new music. It was people from all over the world bringing there music and the DJs would play it all together and trying to make sense of it this Goa sound was born.
“So I came back to London in 1990 and met up with Graham Wood and we started Infinity Project and we wrote a lot of tracks and those tracks went back to Goa and for years we just kept going back forth and in London we did Goa parties every week – that’s how started to get into this real electronic phase,” he notes of his journey into electronic music.
And then in 1996 Ram formed Shpongle with 25-year-old electronic musician Simon Posford and to use a clichéd adage ‘the rest is history’. Since then Shpongle have headlined innumerable dance festivals, are Burning Man royalty, and released five albums with Ram telling me that before he comes to Australia he is heading to the studio to work on album number six.
But before the 73-year-old ends this Skype chat and heads out to the country to record with Posford he enthuses about his relationship Earthcore. “Well I played Earthcore last year as Shpongle without Simon and also did a set at Raja Ram and it was just so fantastic. Getting to do the closing set at festival is a very special experience but at Earthcore it felt just incredible. Simon and I are really excited about this year’s event and while on this trip the country we will be working on the new album we will also be planning our Earthcore set.”
BY DENVER MAXX
