It’s the tour fans thought was never going to happen. This month, Raja Ram and Simon Posford will lead the full ten-piece Shpongle ensemble to the Southern Hemisphere for the very first time. In addition to headline shows in two of the country’s most eminent venues, Shpongle will journey into the Victorian bush as the ultimate Rainbow Serpent Festival headliner.

From their landmark debut Are You Shpongled? in 1998 right through to Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland over a decade later, the creative partnership of Ram and Posford has been an ever-evolving one. For Ram, this live tour is a homecoming. The psychedelic adventurer was born in Melbourne in 1941, and every minute of his life has been an event. He was good enough to answer inthemix’s questions via email, and his responses give a sense of why Shpongle endures.

Shpongle live appearances are exceedingly rare. Is that down to the logistic difficulties of coordinating all the players, or more a philosophy of being selective?
Yeah we wanted to make each one very special. We have done only about eight full live shows. The logistics are hard, because everyone is busy with other projects. The drummer Joe plays with The Grateful Dead, Simon is all over the place like me. I have ZAP, 1200 Micrograms, Tip Records and Shpongle, so life is gloriously busy. It is hard to get 17 people in the one place, but here we go….

What is the special chemistry between yourself and Simon that keeps Shpongle such a lasting partnership?
We do have a very special relationship. Sometime Simon is like my father, an old soul. I am just lucky to know him and produce some nice noises together. Love is the key philosophy. The love of great red wine from Bordeaux or Burgundy. The love of weird and wonderful sounds – high weirdness, weird highness, the cave man to the rave man, eternal celestial musicians hanging around whistling an old tune. Each nanosecond is precious and we try to bring back the language of the shaman through sound. We try sometimes to make magic happen.

It sounds like when you’re working on an album, it’s a very intensive process. Do you both have to be entirely focused?
Oh my god, intense. Yes, we never go out. Closed sessions, no women or newspapers or TV or video games. Just get up, brush the fangs and into the studio. 15 or 20 hours go past and then we repeat for two weeks non-stop. Maybe we get a few minutes worth of sounds we like. The process is slow, so slow. Simon is a perfectionist. I go out for a long walk, come back and then have to go out again because Si has been working on an ant crawling across a snare drum in an Arctic blizzard. Then he gets it and we move on, like a drugged tortoise on opium, with jewels stuck on its back. We walk through the cosmic mirror backwards, while trying to think of nothing, and nothing is something worth doing…

Your most recent album Ineffable Mysteries from Shpongleland was something of a welcome surprise for many fans. Is there a fifth Shpongle chapter in the works?
I told Si we were going to stop after the third, but we did Ineffable Mysteries because we wanted to and our fans wanted more music. We have just finished The God Particle EP, which should be out soon. As far as a fifth, I don’t know. Do you want another album? Really, I feel we have a lot to explore and get into yet and those four albums were just testing the water to see how deep it goes. I guess if I am alive we can do a lot more. I love it.