If you appreciate psychedelia, then you should appreciate this group, and this entry.
Shpongle are great at seemingly recreating hallucinations. The sounds and melodies they incorporate into their music is very reminiscent of your audio experience while under the influence of psychedelics, at least I think so. The splashes, buzzes, and flanges, the pulsating bass lines, the extra-terrestrial beeps and whirs, I know I've been there. The echoes, the bizarre vocal calls, strange whistles and sparks.
"Shpongle", according to the duo, is an umbrella term. I take it to mean: "A strong blanket of transcending euphoria" or something or other. Being "shpongled" is being wrapped in that blanket. I'd like to share a trip report I wrote not too long ago, a day after a true shpongling. It's really the only word I can use to describe that night. I titled it "A Kaleidoscopic Haze of Pleasant Confusion"
School had been out for a week now, summer was in full swing. I had purchased my ticket to see Starf*cker, (indie pop/electronic group) and my friends would get their's at the door. The mention of LSD had only been made to me that very day. Our fat friend, to whom we convinced the show was sold out so he wouldn't go, (it was a terrible move, but for the best, he would have hated it anyway) said that our friend N was interested in getting some. Apparently the acid connection that was iffy weeks before, had now turned legitimate. I was excited from that moment on. After breaking the false news, we left to my friend E's house. Trying to eliminate some confusion here, it was now myself, E, N, and another friend, A, at E's house. A had been conversing with the acid connect, and we came to the conclusion that we would buy twelve hits. Fast forwarding through the waiting period, we get the acid, and A trades a chocolate bar containing an eighth of mushrooms for two more hits. In total, we have fourteen, and we were off to meet A's girlfriend and her friends at the show.
It was hipster mania in there. I remember saying to my friends "there is an immeasurable amount of non-prescription glasses in here." The first act, one man, drunk as the dickens, playing under the moniker 'Feelings.' It was horrid. The "music" was uninspired and dull, and otherwise very rudimentary, like some if little kid found a mixing board in the basement and started fiddling around with it. And his vocals were even worse, cracky moans and mumbling, I was not enjoying myself. The second act, Wampire, was somewhat better. A full band, actual songs, but still blew. It was worth the wait, because Starf*cker was fantastic. Great sound, good visuals, crowd surfing horses and astronauts, and balloons falling from above. They put on a great show.
We returned to E's house at around midnight, and after some gathering of things and ourselves, we took the acid. I think everyone else took two to start with, someone might have even only taken one, but went right ahead and did all three of mine to the dome. It was bitter and numbing. Hopefully, we were in for a wild ride. We stayed inside while the tabs dissolved. I was drinking a cherry coke, I couldn't feel a thing on the spot of my tongue where the acid lie, so the fluid was weird. We also wanted to decide on a movie to watch beforehand, and get it all queued up, because I'm sure we would be too confused to later. We shuffled through the movie selection, and The Animal with Rob Schneider was jokingly brought up. A hadn't seen it, and we've all seen all these other movies dozens of times, so as dumb as it is, that's what we decided on. It had been about twenty minutes or so since we did the acid, and already I feel that shiver, that slight tingle, that lightness. At this point, we went outside to smoke a bowl on the porch.
Sitting outside, I could tell I just did acid. The plants were so bright and prominent. I was shivering erratically, but I don't think anyone noticed. After a bit, we moved into the garage, and continued the bowl. All the seats were taken, I leaned up against the truck. We started talking about how we felt, everyone had started their come up, we all had that same tingle. They began talking about visuals, and I guess no one had any yet. I took the most, though, and was experiencing some very minor hallucinations. I was spacing in and out of the conversation, looking at different surfaces. The markings on a wood cabinet separated themselves from each other. The floor began to spiral, but stopped quickly. Parts of it seemed closer to me than others, like it was warped. A had noticed my confusion. The longer I looked at his face, the tighter his skin grew. He had a very skeletal look about him. I was always the quiet one, and I was even more quiet now. We sat around in the garage for a while, shooting the sh*t and whatnot. According to them, my pupils were extremely large, while everyone else's weren't. I guess I was high.
We finished the bowl, and went back inside. We stopped in the kitchen to wash the X's off of our hands from the show, plus my hands were genuinely dirty. We noticed a carpenter ant crawling along the edge of the counter. It first struck me as bizarre, all these legs and segments, but I shook that feeling away. As we made our way to the living room, N had stopped, and started making slow body motions, he was doing tai-chi, I guess. He was embracing the acid, which we all felt strongly now. We made ourselves comfortable and turned on the movie, and I'll tell ya, it was weird. Never had a movie seemed so strange, and all the dumb jokes combined with the LSD made it uncomfortably hilarious. The characters looked as if they were made of clay. The first person cut scenes of him prowling around at night were almost jarring, we were all astounded after each one. At one point towards the end of the movie, there was a shadow of window blinds cast on the TV screen. Each segment of the screen grew away from each other and melded back. E's dachshund crawled into someone's lap, and we shared a gaze that seemed to last forever. The dog's face implanted itself in the center of my vision, while everything surrounding spiraled into a fractal mess. I almost believe we shared thoughts at that moment, he was a being on a higher level than me, guiding me through this haze. In reality, that moment only lasted like two seconds, but it was significant. The movie was over. E and N wanted to go smoke another bowl, but A and myself stayed inside. We turned off the lamp and sat in silence. I reached the peak of an intense acid trip.
I sat there on the couch, looking around. Everything breathed, nothing was still. Things would blow up like a balloon, and then pop. There was an endless loop of shadows gliding across the floor. I would close my eyes for a minute, and a neon outline of the furniture would remain. But the lines would melt into a puddle, and begin to boil. I opened my eyes with a loud pop, and confetti sprinkled downward from my sight. It was like on of those fireworks, 'BANG! shshshshshshshshshshshs". A turned his head to me and said: "Are you enjoying this as much as I am?". I simply looked at him and nodded. I had to go to the bathroom, I drank like three cherry cokes. Walking was definitely peculiar. My body felt so light. The hallway before the bathroom stretched further and further. I heard the raucous laughter of E and N through the door to the garage. Bathrooms have always been hard to navigate for me while on psychedelics. This was no different. I stood in front of the toilet, and watched it hover around, it would contort itself so much, that urination had become a difficult task. I literally couldn't do it, as I didn't want to, you know, get it everywhere. In hindsight, it would've been easier to just go outside. On my way out, I stopped and looked in the mirror. My entire iris was black, and this frightened me a tad, the look on my face. I walked back to the living room, the hallway that had stretched out before, now shrunk on my way back. I went to lie down on the couch, and zone out some more. It was still silent. A had asked me if I was having crazy auditory hallucinations. I said "like what?". I don't know why. But I was. Mainly that popping and crackling. If I closed my eyes, there would be a loud whir. I was looking upward now. A hallucination of a colorful compass-like object etched circles out of the ceiling. Each one would then descend to me, and evaporate. Occasionally, one of the circles would drift away, leaving an empty space where it used to be. I sat up, watching the ceiling the whole time as it shifted. All the circles were gone, and for a moment, there was nothing, not even myself. This split second dragged for a bit, this was the best example of time dilation from that night. I was thinking, "What's happened? Everything has ceased." It wasn't even just black, but a truly empty void, inhabited only by my ego, which had momentarily separated itself from my body. Surreal thoughts and phrases bolted through the emptiness. I heard loud thunder, and odd skittering. Random, miscellaneous words strung together to form sentences, looking back, they were nonsense, but I understood them at the time. The edge of the void began wrinkling inward, and another circle appeared in the center, the ceiling shone through. And just like that, the void had been wiped away. It was like a play, I had reached the end of an act, and some strange, omnipresent deity closed the curtain, and opened it once again. I was back on the couch, and for a second, I wasn't even hallucinating, everything was normal. For a moment I was thinking how weird my body felt, and how weird the body is. I am just a conscious, trapped inside a shell, all these thoughts and ideas compressed inside. While in that void, my conscious was free, and everything in my mind escaped, and began roaming free.
A had gotten up, blanket wrapped around him, "I'm going upstairs," he said. I guess he was ready to crash. He asked to me to hand him the vial on the table next to me, and I did, I was functioning easily. It was xanax for when we wanted to go to sleep. I was alone now. I decide to try to use the bathroom again. This time it wasn't as hard, and I finally relieved myself. I looked in the mirror again, still black. My skin had turned a weird orange color. The reflection of the wall behind me was a blur, and every feature on my body morphed slowly. The whites of my eyes had disappeared, and it was just two black dots, darting around my face. I walked back through this accordion of a hallway, and turned to the living room. It was completely different. Everything was growing all over everything else. It all amplified itself greatly, everything was a hundred times brighter, and I could see every color and every shade imaginable throughout the room. I was awestruck. The floor spun rapidly as I walked across it. I turned my attention to E's shoes, a pair of black and white Converse high tops. They lifted off the ground, just barely, about a centimeter, and began rotating. One went clockwise, the other counter-clockwise. I was fascinated, and continued watching. They landed, and then began vibrating. You know those wind up shoe toys that walk around? Well, they had wound themselves up. The right shoe would take a step, and the left would wait until it was down, and take it's own step. They walked all across the floor, leaving a sparkling black and white checkerboard trail behind them. Even when I turned my head, they would make their way into my peripheral and across the floor again. I looked up, and they continued walking, across the center of my vision, up walls, on the ceiling. I was dumbfounded. They walked with me into the kitchen, by that time, the entire living room floor was a glowing checkerboard. I was in the kitchen, and once they stepped onto the white kitchen floor, they disappeared. I looked back, and they were sitting there on the floor, which had returned to normal.
I went into the garage to join E and N, but N was just on his way back inside. E and I then shared a bowl. Every time I reached for it, my arms would move in slow motion, and even slower when I went to light it. After it was done, we went back inside, I was in front. Walking back to the living room I saw N sitting on the couch, staring at me. I couldn't see his face, but my mind improvised, painting one on, with a wide smile. I said, "What's up?" He just laughed and hopped up and toward me. When E came in, he asked where A had gone. I said he went upstairs. After a moment of frustration on his part, we all decided to migrate. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard to get some water from the fridge. I pushed the button in on the dispenser, and a red liquid filled my glass. An intense red. Bubbles rose from the water like it was carbonated. We went upstairs. The stairway seemed so high from the bottom. When we opened the door to E's room, it was pitch black. I shuffled in slowly as my vision was overtaken by kaleidoscope. E turned on the light, and the shards all fell away. A was lying in the bed. Someone had asked if he was having a bad trip, he said no and he was just tired. I think his trip was over by the time we got there, if not soon after. We all got situated, E in his chair, N sat at the end of the bed, and I sat up against the wall on the right side of the bed. The Simpsons had been turned on. While the opening sequence ran, I looked at my hands, I would wave them back and forth. The tracers were so prominent, that an image would still be in the place where I began to move it. I believe N had taken a fourth hit of acid by now, and he looked considerably high and confused. He was waving his hands around too.
I was still peaking, I could tell. The show had no meaning to me. I understood the words being said, and recognized them as language, but they didn't process in my mind. They were speaking English, but that lost all it's meaning to me. I wasn't even thinking in English, thoughts formed as vivid images in my mind's eye. Everything happening on the show was so miscellaneous, it was just a huge jumble of oddness, yet we were all cracking up. E would laugh hysterically and turn to us and say "I didn't understand any of that." If I focused on a single character, everything around their face would mold together, and they would be a head, floating in a sea of psychedelia. I would also notice characters aging, right before my eyes. Hair would grow long and gray, wrinkles would form around their face, until they died. I would see the skin rot off, until they were nothing but a skeleton. I was seeing characters getting hurt on TV, and it started occurring to me that I didn't understand basic concepts of life anymore, such as pain. I didn't understand feelings and physical sensations, emotions, language, etc. I would even pinch myself, I couldn't feel anything. Everything I knew about life had gone. I almost felt like I wasn't supposed to be alive. I felt that if I died that instant, nothing would change. The world would continue, and I would stay in this state. Like there was no border between life and death. I wasn't worried at all, just a little shocked that I had reached ego-death. This lasted for a while. I was already dead. If my heart stopped, I would remain in that bed, in the same state of confusion and state of mind, and nothing would change at all. Once I had reached that stage, that feeling would remain for the rest of the night. That feeling of acceptance.
I was coming down now. I had no idea what time it was, but we ended up watching four-ish episodes of the Simpsons. N was still very high. Earlier he had smacked the bed, A jerked up and asked "what was that?' N said he didn't know, or something, I'm not entirely sure how he replied. A said he was almost finally asleep before that, and he hadn't gotten any sleep the rest of the night. Language made more sense now, I could piece words together and understand what they meant. An odd hallucination, I remember, occurred while the show was on. I was looking straight ahead, towards the TV, and had my legs outstretched in front of me. The only way I could describe it was as a cliff side drive-in. With the bed as the cliff, and the TV Suspended out over the edge of the cliff. There was more to it than that, but you know, sometimes you just can't explain it. It's all personal, only you understand what you're trying to say. Sometimes it's like "Whoa, that plant is growing up the wall," and everyone will say yeah man. Sometimes you try to put it into words but you can't, and what does come out is jumbled and confusing.
I don't remember much of what else happened while the sun was down, but it soon rose, much to all of our surprise. We tried to smoke another bowl in the room, but that confusion kept setting in. Someone would hold it forever, stuff like that. If I recall correctly, we didn't finish it for at least two hours. That morning was riddled with bewilderment. A and E had been trying to go to sleep earlier, so they did a lot of xanax, but it only got them high. We were trudging around the room, throwing ourselves all over the furniture. N was still pretty on acid, but I think he started coming down. I was almost all the way down, there were still mild tracers and confusion, of course. We would start looking for things, but forget what and continue looking. "I have no idea what I'm looking for." We discussed taking a morning walk, and smoking the bowl outside, (which was still going around, apparently) but we never made it. It was around eight o'clock, and we were still shuffling around, falling everywhere on purpose. Nobody had any idea about anything. We were fried. A bottle of Gatorade suddenly came into existence, I don't know where it came from, and someone took a drink and remarked that it was the greatest thing he had ever drank. We all took long, very long, satisfying gulps, and whole-heartedly agreed. I myself was parched, and this Gatorade quenched like no other.
We wandered around some more, then E's dad went off to work. We took that as the queue to go downstairs and outside. Most of the confusion was gone. We sat outside, which was incredibly bright and vibrant. Everything was calm. We smoked about 600 bowls and reminisced about the night. It was rejuvenating, to say the least. I felt like I had just been born. I was shpongled out of my mind.
Tl:dr got real high on acid, didn't know what the f*ck.