With less than two weeks to go until the start of the fest­ival, we bring you this week’s Spot­light On: Szi­get 2010, focus­sing on the Israeli psy­che­delic trance group, Infec­ted Mush­room. The band star­ted out with only two mem­bers, Erez Eisen (I.Zen) and Amit Dudevani (Dudev) in 1998 in north­ern Israel. Since then, they have been joined by three oth­ers to form the most recent line-up, that used for “Legend of the Black Shawarma”.

Their first for­ays into the world of music together were made in 1998, and they looked to make trance music pure and simple, it was not for another year or two that Infec­ted Mushroom’s uniquely iden­ti­fi­able darker side began to show itself, on The Gath­er­ing. The Gath­er­ing launched Infec­ted Mush­room into the pub­lic con­scious­ness, bring­ing psy-trance to the masses in a way that no other group had suc­cess­fully man­aged. Their second album, Clas­sical Mush­room, is widely con­sidered their best work so far, although Last.fm stat­ist­ics sug­gest that 2007’s Vicious Deli­cious is far more pop­u­lar, and Clas­sical Mush­room is their fourth most pop­u­lar album. (A quick note: Last.fm was launched in 2002, and its userbase remained fairly small for a while so it’s worth remem­ber­ing that some skew towards more recent albums is to be expected).

More recently, Infec­ted Mush­room have exper­i­mented with com­bin­ing psytrance with other musical genres, lead­ing to strange and excit­ing records such as “The Other Side” of Con­vert­ing Veget­ari­ans (my per­sonal favour­ite album). As of 2004, Infec­ted Mush­room no longer live in Israel, and are instead res­id­ents in Los Angeles, Cali­for­nia, with one of their mem­bers (Tom Cun­ning­ham) play­ing gui­tar in Amer­ican shows, and another (Erez Netz) else­where. The band have been “on tour” since 1999, and have played all over the globe to mil­lions of fans.

Spo­tify