Throwback Thursday: Sasha & John Digweed’s Northern Exposure 2, the Overlooked Follow Up

Whilst everyone is talking about the reissue of Northern Exposure, and rightly so, its follow up has slipped quietly into the background. Late Night Tales released Northern Exposure Redux last Friday, 30 years after the original, with remastered North and South editions, a third disc of new dub reworks and the mix finally arriving on streaming platforms. They even are auctioning the original vinyl used for the mix. Check it out here. It is a fitting tribute. But it also feels like the right moment to pull the second installment off the shelf. Northern Exposure 2 is often treated as the supporting act. Spend some time with it and a different picture emerges. For a good number of people who were there, it is the better record, and some would go further and call it the finest thing Sasha and John Digweed put their names to together. So sit back with a nice cup of tea, or a bottle of Irish whiskey, if you are of my persuasion, press play and let us take a trip back to 1997.

To understand why the second volume mattered, you have to start with the first. Northern Exposure arrived on 27 September 1996 through Ministry of Sound, following the gold-selling Renaissance: The Mix Collection. Where most mix compilations of the time tried to bottle a Saturday night peak, this one did the opposite. It drifted through progressive house, dub, trance, ambient and breakbeat, pulling records from deep in the crates rather than from the top of the club charts, and it treated two CDs as a single piece of work with a beginning, a middle and an end. It shaped what a DJ mix album could be, and over the years it acquired a standing that went well beyond its sales, argued over in record shops and held up as a template others would borrow from. Myths grow around records like that, and Northern Exposure became one.

Which is exactly what made the follow up so difficult.

The Britain that Northern Exposure 2 was released into was a country in the middle of changing its mind about itself. On 2 May 1997 Tony Blair walked into Downing Street on the back of a landslide, ending 18 years of Conservative government. Whatever your politics, and whatever came later, the mood that spring and summer was hard to miss. People who had come of age under Thatcher and Major, through the poll tax, the miners’ strike and the Criminal Justice Act with its pointed clause about repetitive beats, felt the weather turn. Britpop was at its height. The Chemical Brothers had topped the album chart with Dig Your Own Hole, The Prodigy followed with The Fat of the Land, and Roni Size and Reprazent would take the Mercury Prize in September. The superclubs were full. Cream, Renaissance, Ministry and Gatecrasher had turned a scene that was once policed into a lifestyle that was marketed, for better and for worse. Club culture was no longer a fringe activity. It was part of the national fabric.

Sasha and Digweed were at the centre of all of it, and increasingly beyond it too. Their time in America, including regular nights at Twilo in New York, was building an audience across the Atlantic that had barely existed a few years earlier. Expectations were high on both sides of the water. Into that climate, Ministry of Sound released Northern Exposure 2 on 14 July 1997: 2 discs, 2.5 hours of music, and a peak of number 15 on the UK compilation chart.

Following a record that people already spoke of in hushed tones was never going to be easy. Repeat the formula too closely and you are accused of standing still. Move too far and you lose the thread. What Northern Exposure 2 does, rather cleverly, is keep the architecture and change the materials. The first volume leaned on older records and deep catalogue. The second is more current, built from music that was fresh in 1996 and 1997, some of it barely known outside the DJ booth. That choice carries risk, because current records date. Listening now, it is striking how few of them have.

The first disc, EXP01, is the one most people talk about, and with good reason. It opens with the 16B remix of GusGus’s Believe and slides into Chicane’s two takes on Furry Phreaks’ Soothe, setting a tone that is unhurried and slightly melancholic. From there it moves through Violet’s murky Central Pro NYC, Prana’s Geomantik and The Acoustic Hoods’ Cycles of Time, and the passage from that into Frontside’s Dammerung is the sort of transition that reminds you this was assembled in a studio with great care rather than lifted from a gig. Gez Dewar and Nick Hale appear twice in the same breath, as The Experiment and Doi-Oing, two versions of Blue layered over one another. Spooky, Uberzone and Fluke’s Reeferendrum keep the breakbeat pulse moving, before the closing run of Lost Tribe’s Angel, GusGus’s Purple and Hybrid’s twelve minute Symphony. That last stretch is a lesson in building tension without reaching for the obvious release. Hybrid were then a little known Welsh outfit whose relationship with Sasha would deepen over the following years. You can hear why he backed them.

The second disc, EXP02, is a different animal. It begins in a more meditative space with Cygnus X’s Positron, Speedy J’s Fusion and Humate’s 3.2, the latter a slower, more spacious reading than many expected. William Orbit (RIP) and Spooky’s remix of Sven Väth’s An Accident in Paradise, The Light’s Panfried and Third Man’s Solar Cycle carry it gradually towards progressive trance, through LSG’s Netherworld in its Jules Verne mix, Taucher’s Waters and Mantra’s remix of Art of Silence’s Teach Me. It closes with Transa’s Enervate and Blue Fear by a young Dutch producer credited simply as Armin, years before the van Buuren name became a global brand. Some listeners have always felt those final two sit slightly apart from what comes before, and it is a fair point. Others hear them as the logical end of a disc that crosses from one era of trance into the next. Either way, the opening half has aged better than its reputation at the time suggested, partly because several of its records were later played so widely by others that they lost their surprise. Waters turned up on what seemed like every trance compilation of the following two years. Heard here, in context, it sounds as it was meant to.

Received wisdom has long held the first disc as Sasha’s and the second as Digweed’s, and there is something in the character of each that supports that reading. Neither, though, was the work of one man alone, and the joins between their two sensibilities are part of what makes the whole thing hold together.

Then there is the American edition, which tells its own story. When Ultra Records brought Northern Exposure 2 to the United States, the two discs were not sold as a pair. They were issued separately, the first as the East Coast Edition and the second as the West Coast Edition, reaching American shops around the turn of 1998. Part of the reasoning was conceptual. The series had always been framed as a journey across territory, and the new Redux divides the first volume into North and South. For a US audience, rotating the compass to east and west gave each disc a landscape listeners already carried in their heads, a route from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, and it nodded to the touring that had built the pair’s name there. Part of it was almost certainly commercial. A double CD DJ mix was a harder sell in late nineties American retail than two single discs, and two releases meant two price points. Something was lost in the translation. Ministry’s UK packaging included track map inlays showing how the mixes were layered in the studio, and the Ultra versions went without them. Collectors will also tell you that clean copies of the East Coast Edition have become harder to find than its sibling. A review in the Orlando Weekly in March 1998 summed up the American reception neatly, “hearing a sparse, mysterious quality on the East disc and something faster and brighter on the West”. That still holds.

A word on the sleeve, because it is part of the record’s identity. The UK digipak carries an iceberg shown in section, a small visible peak above the waterline and a far larger mass hidden beneath. The image came from the Tony Stone picture library, with sleeve design and artwork by Chris Jones and Mark Saunders. Pedants have noted that icebergs do not quite sit in the water like that. It hardly matters. As a visual idea it works remarkably well: cold, northern, quietly vast, and a neat metaphor for an album built from records most people had never heard, drawn from the part of club culture that sat below the surface. It carried on the first volume’s sense of place without repeating it. Collectors should also note that the original sleeve misprints several titles, including the Violet, Uberzone, Fluke and Cygnus X selections, which only adds to the archaeology.

So where does Northern Exposure 2 sit, nearly three decades on? Well, whilst listening back to it as I write this and a few Irish whiskeys down, It’s not a revolution in the way the first volume was. It could not be, because the first one had already rewritten the rules (and for mixes ever after). What it does is confirm that those rules were no accident. It shows two DJs at the height of their powers choosing restraint over spectacle, trusting an audience to follow them somewhere unfamiliar, and building something that rewards a full listen from start to finish. It was always going to be a very tough follow up to achieve, and it does not disappoint. With the original now back in circulation, a remaster of this one would be welcome. Until then, the old CDs are still out there, and they still sound like a journey worth taking.

by Damion Pell

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