Global Underground 006: Sydney (CD1)

If your memory of John Digweed starts with him standing next to Sasha, Global Underground 006: Sydney is where I'd send you to hear what happens when you remove the other bloke from the picture.

Not because Digweed suddenly becomes a completely different DJ. Quite the opposite.

A lot of the patience that made Renaissance and Northern Exposure work is still here. What changes is where that patience is pointing.

Sydney CD1 is deeper, more rhythm-led and less interested in the kind of widescreen melodic payoff that Sasha was increasingly associated with by the late 1990s. It doesn't announce that difference with some giant opening statement either. It just starts moving and gradually tightens the bastard.

Fortunato & Montresor's Imagine opens things quietly enough, followed by Liquid Language's Blu Savannah and Pocket's Wonky. Jan Driver's Filter starts putting more weight behind it before Shapeshifter's Flood stretches the groove out properly.

This isn't a mix desperately trying to prove it's important.

That's probably why it works.

Digweed has always been unusually comfortable with the middle of a set. Lots of DJs are brilliant at opening. Plenty know exactly which enormous record they want to finish with. The difficult bit is the forty minutes in between, when you have to keep moving without constantly resetting the room.

Sydney lives in that middle.

Danny Tenaglia's Elements (The Chant) is a perfect example. On paper, it's an obvious personality record. In the mix, it isn't treated like a celebrity cameo. It becomes another piece of percussion and atmosphere inside something Digweed has already been building for half an hour.

Then Hong Kong Trash's Down The River, Abundance's Spiritual and Brother Brown's Slap Me Some Skin keep nudging the thing forward rather than blowing it open.

That's the Digweed trick.

You don't always notice the precise point at which the set becomes heavier.

Five minutes later you just realise it has.

By 1998, that approach had already been established through his work with Sasha. Renaissance: The Mix Collection had shown how seriously the pair took the relationship between records. Northern Exposure had pushed the same idea into darker, stranger territory.

But those releases can make it difficult to separate the two personalities because the partnership is the bloody point.

Sydney doesn't have that problem.

Digweed gets the full canvas.

And what emerges isn't simply “the darker half of Sasha & Digweed”, which has always been a lazy way of explaining him anyway. There is melody here. There is trance influence. There are records that eventually open the room up.

He's just much less interested in giving those moments away cheaply.

David Alvarado's Blue arrives late enough to feel properly useful, and the closing stretch through Lando and Albion's Air finally lets more light into a mix that has spent most of its running time keeping you underneath the surface.

Air works because Digweed hasn't been firing records like that at you for the previous hour.

Same principle as ever:

starve the mix of something, then let it matter when it finally turns up.

It's also worth putting Sydney beside the Sasha & Digweed material immediately before and after it.

Northern Exposure in 1996 is deliberately spacious and occasionally weird.

Northern Exposure 2 in 1997 tightens that approach and lets progressive trance further into the room.

By Communicate in 2000, the partnership has become tougher, darker and much more club-focused.

Sydney sits beautifully in between.

You can hear Digweed's own preferences becoming clearer before Communicate takes some of that tougher attitude back into the partnership.

And this was exactly the sort of thing Global Underground was very good at preserving.

The city concept, photography and expensive-looking packaging obviously helped make these CDs objects people wanted to own. But the format also gave DJs two discs and enough space to actually programme something.

Sydney doesn't need to win you over in five minutes because nobody involved seems remotely worried about you pressing skip.

That confidence feels almost alien now.

There are bits of this disc that would probably look unremarkable isolated in a playlist. That's not an insult. Some records are supposed to do a job inside a set.

Digweed understood that better than most.

He could take something that wasn't remotely screaming CLASSIC from the sleeve, put it between two other records and suddenly make the whole twenty-minute section feel essential.

That's why Sydney belongs in the Classic Chart.

Not because every Global Underground deserves automatic sainthood.

They don't.

And not because Digweed somehow needs a participation trophy because Sasha already has several entries.

He doesn't.

It belongs because CD1 demonstrates one of the things this entire Archive keeps coming back to: a great mix isn't just a stack of great tunes.

The boring records matter.

The transitions nobody remembers matter.

The half-hour where apparently fuck all is happening matters.

Because that's what makes Air feel like Air when it finally arrives.

Put Sydney CD1 on from the beginning.

Don't hunt for a massive breakdown.

Digweed will get there.

He just couldn't give a shit whether you're impatient.