Shpongle
Simon Posford and Raja Ram built a psychedelic electronic world from trance, ambient space, flute, global instrumentation and dubby low-end illusion. Their influence sits closer to psybient than reggae, but the dub current is real.
Shpongle formed in England in the second half of the 1990s around producer Simon Posford and flautist/conceptual collaborator Raja Ram. Their music layered psychedelic synthesis with acoustic and sampled instruments from many traditions, treating albums as long, morphing environments rather than collections of conventional songs. “Are You Shpongled?” arrived in 1998 and became a foundational psybient record, followed by “Tales of the Inexpressible” in 2001. Dub appears through bass depth, echo, pacing and the way space is composed, but Shpongle is not fundamentally a reggae project. In the Tree, the group belongs as a kindred psydub/psybient route showing how far dub-informed spatial thinking can travel.