They’re one of the foremost names in psychedelic trance and lay claim to some of the best innovations in the musical genre. Purists may call their work sacrilegious, but on the international music scene, they are a rage. Hard-core psy-trance listeners in India swear by them and wouldn’t miss their show for anything. Infected Mushroom, the young duo from Israel is back in India this week to perform in big cities across the country.

Starting out with experimentation in their bedroom studio, Erez Aizen and Amit Duvdevani grew as musicians from the small north-Israeli town of Haifa. Borrowing their name from a local disbanded punk-rock band called ‘Infected’, they burst into the psy-trance scene in 1998 with their first album The Gathering. The compilation was well-received and successive albums Classical Mushroom (2000) and B P Empire put the band prominently on the psy-trance map. “Things have changed a lot with Psychedelic trance, for the good and bad. What’s good is the classic association of drugs with this music is now fading. The scene is much cleaner now. What’s bad is the commercialisation. Now you see a Coca Cola sponsoring raves! It’s outrageous. But that also gives us more validity as serious musicians and that works for us,” says Duvdevani aka Duvdev.

Incidentally, he has no Indian connection as his name may suggest. Aizen jokingly offers his theory about a history of adultery in his family that Duvdev may be unaware of.

Their long-term collaborations also performed with the band guitarist, Erez Netz and Brazilian percussionist Rogerio Jardim. Netz had to deal with a lot of jeering from the psy-trance purists. A separate guitarist is a rare phenomenon. “It took time for people to get used to it. But then it’s guitar; everybody likes it,” affirms Netz who comes from a Rock background. Infected Mushroom has even been bold enough to experiment with flamenco and their 2007 album Vicious Delicious has a track that fuses in hip-hop with the genre that has so far maintained a pretty isolated position.

Their mood is playful and their motto is to have fun. A characteristic common to many youth from the region. Duvdev chooses to keep the politics out. “We are born into a land of conflict and we’re used to it now. We just want to keep hate away and party, play our music the best we can and basically have a good time.”