Raja Ram
Raja Ram is the performing name of Ronald Gary Rothfield, an Australian-born, London-based musician and DJ who founded the progressive rock band Quintessence before shifting into the psytrance world he later helped define. He runs TIP Records, an English psytrance label that became a central platform for the genre through the 1990s and 2000s, and he co-founded Shpongle alongside Simon Posford, a project blending psychedelic textures with live instrumentation including his own flute playing.
Rothfield studied flute at the Melbourne Conservatory before travelling to New York in 1965 to study jazz and improvisation, a background that later fed into his melodic, instrumentally rich approach to psytrance production and DJ sets. He also formed 1200 Micrograms, a further project extending his reach across the psychedelic trance scene beyond TIP Records and Shpongle.
Raja Ram's DJ sets have long combined his own catalogue with wider psytrance staples, delivered at festivals and club nights connected to the genre's international touring circuit. Well into his later decades, he has continued performing and running TIP Records, maintaining a role often described within the psytrance community as a foundational figure of the genre's development.