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Okay, I'll try and put this thread to good use...
The first one was released in 1996 as a tie-in with the duo's Northern Exposure night which ran at Heaven in London on a Monday night. The duo wanted to start a regular event which would draw in the music lovers who appreciated long and varied sets and didn't just expect anthem after anthem. As Sasha told Muzik magazine: "If you get a crowd at your club on a Monday night it's because they're into their music. Whereas a Saturday crowd will see something in a magazine and turn up expecting to be entertained."
In keeping with the ethos of the night, the first compilation avoids the obvious anthems of the day. Although modern listeners may believe that the tracks on Northern Exposure were being dropped by Sasha and Diggers in a club, the majority of the first disc was actually headed towards "classic" status even by 1996. "On the Northern Exposure album, there was a lot of tunes we'd maybe listened to when we'd come in from a night out that we wouldn't be able to play in the club because they weren't appropriate. They're great records that we could listen to but we could never play them out" Digweed told Triple J in Australia. "We just wanted to choose stuff from our back catalogues and our record collections," Sasha continued, "They were classic records to us but perhaps forgotten classics".
Consequently the first disc encapsulates the vintage ambient house sounds of the early '90s, ultra-long psychedelic remixes by The Orb meeting the blissed out breakbeat sounds of San Fran's Hardkiss Records, the early progressive house vibes of Guerilla Records and the globe-trotting ethno-dub of Banco De Gaia. Many of the tracks are heavily re-edited in ProTools with additional FX and soundscapes layered into the mix, creating something a million miles away from a live club set but conjuring a delectable head-food global travelogue. It reaches a sublime pinnacle with Spooky's seminal Xylem Flow remix of William Orbit's chill-out classic Water From A Vine Leaf - a truly timeless piece of glistening progressive majesty.
While the second disc contains a few classic cuts of its own, such as Underworld's achingly delicate remix of The Drum Club's Sound System, it's mostly a look forward to what would become the future sound of progressive house. Arranged in a slow-burning and stripped down set, tracks like the pounding Junior Vasquez remix of Pete Lazonby's Wave Speech or Evolution's anthemic The Phoenix sound remarkably like the massing clouds of Twilo.
Northern Exposure 2 followed only a year later and like the original, was published by Ministry Of Sound. "People may think it's weird that we've teamed up with the Ministry," admitted Sasha, "But they were on the ball and were ready to stick their necks out for us." Like the first compilation, NE2 is divided into a home-listening first disc and a more clubbed-up second, but this time round the roles are arguably reversed: by stitching together a disparate array of cutting edge breakbeats, Disc One offers a proleptic glimpse of the breakbeat progressive sound that would inform Sasha's Airdrawndagger album and lead Digweed to found Bedrock Breaks.
The eclecticism of this disc is perhaps even more impressive than the first Northern Exposure. Where else can you hear the sultry tones of Gus Gus' Believe rubbing shoulders with the electro-phunk of Violet, or Australian big beat novelties Frontside next to goa-trance favourites Prana? Once again Sasha and Diggers combed through their collections to showcase records that they would never get chance to drop in a regular club set. Just as the first NE peaks with a Spooky remix, the disc builds to a marvelous mid-set peak where Doi-Oing's shimmering ethereal classic Blue melts drip by synthetic drip into the Live Mix of Spooky's classic Little Bullet, before dropping the emotional intensity down to the bare beats of Uberzone and regrouping for an attempt at the sweeping orchestral summit of Hybrid's Symphony.
Continuing the role reversal, for large parts of its duration Disc Two is a rerun of the glory days of early '90s trance, with "forgotten classics" courtesy of Cygnus X, Speedy J and Sven Vath setting the tone, before Sasha and Digweed move towards a barrage of anthemic up-front progressive trance from LSG, Transa and Armin Van Buuren to end the compilation. Although the cover sleeve warns the listener that tracks were sourced from vinyl and surface noise can still be heard, Northern Exposure is as much a laser-etched studio creation as its older brother. Subtle re-edits and additional FX are audible throughout to those familiar with the originals, and the mixing style is remarkably nuanced. Witness the moment when Humate's 3.2 emerges almost imperceptibly into the mix and you realise that Sasha and Digweed are deliberately constructing the mix with spliff-head studio detail for post-club comedown engrossment. For my money Northern Exposure 2 is without question the high point of the trilogy.
After a two-year hiatus, Northern Exposure Expeditions touched down in 1999 to end the series. The most conventional of the three, Expeditions unfortunately does away with the "post-club disc" concept and instead presents two sets of fairly straight-up progressive house and trance of the variety that was ruling the cooler side of clubland at the turn of the millenium. There's still a sprinkling of classic cuts to be heard, most notably Delta Lady's Renaissance classic Anything You Want, but the concept is less adventurous. The track that was excised was actually the Fade Sanctuary remix of Silence on the US edition, in an echo of how Global Underground 009 emerged Stateside stripped of Der Dritte Raum's Hale Bopp due to licensing issues. The removal of such a skyscraping anthem undoubtedly harms the flow of the first disc, and first-time listeners are advised to seek out the British release for this reason. For me the unadventurous presentation of Expeditions marks it out as the least interesting of the three. That said, the intro gambit of Breeder's Tyrantanic melting like glacier ice into Space Manoeuvres' Stage One is a truly spine-tingling moment and one of the highlights of the whole series.
Hopefully that provides a bit of insight so this isn't just "yet another Northern Exposure thread". And for what it's worth, I wrote all of that myself apart from the quotes. I always had it in my head to write a full article on Northern Exposure one day.
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Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24
Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/
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