Mutations (2001)
- Progressive House
- Progressive
One thing to be clear about at the top: this isn't a commercial release. There's no label, no catalogue number and no sleeve. It's a mix Ian Ossia made in 2001 and put online himself years afterwards, and everything good about it follows from that.
He rates it, for a start. His own note describes it as one of his better mixes of the previous decade, which is a more useful recommendation than any press release. He also mentions that it runs a few BPM faster than the sets he was playing by the time he uploaded it, and that going back to old recordings brings back memories you'd otherwise have lost entirely.
That last bit is basically the whole reason this site exists, so I'll leave it there.
The tempo remark is worth chewing on, though, because it dates the mix precisely. 2001 progressive had picked up speed. The warm, roomy, vocal-friendly sound of the mid-90s had been steadily squeezed into something tighter and more insistent, with tribal percussion and darker grooves doing more of the work. Hearing a Renaissance resident inside that shift — rather than a headliner assembling a career statement — is the point of putting it up.
And it is very clearly a resident's mix. It builds. Records get enough time to do a job. The pressure comes on gradually and there's no moment where he panics and throws something obvious at you to buy attention. That's the skill you learn playing to the same room every month, not the one you learn flying in for ninety minutes.
There's no reliable tracklist. Mixcloud's tag says “playing tracks by Maurice” and nothing more, which is not a tracklist, so there isn't one on this page. It doesn't matter as much as you'd think. This isn't a mix you listen to for the ID hunt.
What you do get is one hour and six minutes, unbranded, from a DJ whose name almost never appears in the retelling of the Renaissance story. If you only know the club through Sasha and Digweed, this is a good corrective — and the 1998 two-disc Renaissance resident showcase, where Ossia takes CD1, is the natural next stop.
Recommended if you like: Ossia's disc of Renaissance Presents… Volume One, resident sets rather than branded mix CDs, and the tighter, faster progressive sound of 2001 — the site's Ian Ossia profile and the After 2001 feature both go further into it.