The descent from “holy hell! Northern Exposure is getting reissued!” to “actually I don’t think I’ve ever heard Northern Exposure” was swift and vicious.
I mean, I must have heard it, right? Sasha and John Digweed’s second mix album was a classic of the mid 90s, a follow up to their similarly ubiquitous Renaissance: The Mix Collection (which I definitely have heard) that paved the way from progressive house to trance. Northern Exposure went Silver in the UK, selling 60,000 copies and I certainly saw it everywhere. So I must have heard it, right?
Wrong. Then again, maybe that’s not that surprising. Northern Exposure was released in September 1996. By this point I had been clubbing for about a year. My tastes leaned firmly towards Chicago House and Detroit Techno - influenced by Manchester’s Bugged Out! - and I didn’t have a lot of time for the superstar DJ combo of Sasha and Digweed, who tended to play the kind of clubs you would need good shoes to enter.
True: I had a friends who were getting into trance. But they tended more towards Goa, acid and hard trance, rather than the fluffy, progressive house-inspired style that Sasha and Digweed were ambling towards. And so Northern Exposure went unheard.
The news that the album, a double-CD mix, no less, was getting reissued as Northern Exposure Redux, including a new bonus disc of dub reworks, sent me scuttling to Wikipedia to look for more info. I was expecting to find a tracklisting heavy on proto trance and fluffy house. Instead, I was surprised to find a wide-angled selection that brought together unlikely bed fellows in a way that defied easy logic and suggested a pair of DJs with a very distinct vision.
Disc One, 0° North, is home to dub house disco specialists Spooky; Keiichi Suzuki’s ambient classic Satellite Serenade; rave weirdos turned IDM heroes The Future Sound of London and Banco de Gaia, a Megadog-friendly global dance specialist who I associate more with Eat Static and fluoro paint than Silver-selling mix CDs.
On Disc Two, 0° South, there are two more Megadog favourites in the shape of Drum Club and Underworld - very 1996 acts; plus New York tribal house chief Junior Vasquez and Florida breakbeat trance act Rabbit in the Moon. What the hell is this album?
And so I dived in.
What I found was a fascinating relic of a strain of dance music that seems to have almost disappeared from history. True, Sasha and Digweed remain huge in 2026, while some of the names on the mixes - like Underworld and Vasquez - are among the biggest in dance music lore. And, yes, you can definitely hear the sound of commercial trance forming, particularly on disc two.
But I can’t imagine any DJ playing a set like this in 2026: it’s too slow for trance; too clean for techno; and too varied for tech house. The music isn’t particularly weird or obtuse - it simply doesn’t fit with dance music trends, like a 2026 Schaffel revival or a clownstep DJ set.
And this, in a way, is Northern Exposure’s strength. The mix captures a very particular time in British dance music history, when progressive house was edging its way gently towards trance, before Paul van Dyk and co. emerged to bosh commercial trance into hard-paced ubiquity.
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