Essential Mix

Nick Warren’s Essential Mix from 3 October 1999 is what happens when the patient bloke from the 1995 broadcast gets handed a much bigger room and still refuses to panic.

Four years earlier, Warren’s Essential Mix was deep, rolling and almost stubbornly understated. By 1999 the landscape around him had changed. Global Underground was firmly established, Way Out West had become a serious production outlet, and progressive house was getting brighter, tougher and increasingly tangled up with trance.

You can hear all of that here without Warren suddenly turning into somebody else.

Urban Tribe’s ‘Social Theorist’ gives the opening a slightly odd, left-field edge before Delicious, Guillaume La Tortue and the Bedrock mix of Heller & Farley’s ‘The Rising Sun’ start tightening the groove. Presence, Way Out West and Dos Deviants push it further into the late-90s progressive sound, but the set never becomes a parade of giant recognisable records.

That matters because 1999 was absolutely capable of producing that kind of mix. Trance was exploding, progressive house was moving into bigger rooms, and the temptation to stack breakdown after breakdown must have been enormous. Warren mostly ignores it.

Way Out West’s ‘Activity’ and ‘Spike’ sit naturally in the set without becoming adverts for his own project. Ashtrax, Highland, Pob and Sphere keep the middle and later sections moving through breaks, progressive house and trance-facing material. By the time K90 and Paragliders appear near the end, the set has become much brighter than it started — but Warren has made you walk there.

That is the bit I like.

Compare this with his 20 August 1995 Essential Mix and the difference is obvious. The earlier recording feels more intimate and house-rooted. This one hits harder and carries the scale of his Global Underground years. But the architecture underneath is identical: let a section settle, move the mood a few degrees, then make the next change feel inevitable rather than clever.

Warren’s association with Global Underground sometimes makes it easy to treat his career as a sequence of city-branded CDs. This broadcast is useful because it strips the packaging away. No Prague. No Budapest. No Shanghai. Just two hours on Radio 1 proving the same method works without a silver sleeve around it.

There is melody here, but it is rarely cheap. There are harder records, but the set never turns aggressive for the sake of it. There are trance records, but they arrive through progressive pacing rather than replacing it.

That balance is probably why Warren ages so well.

A huge 1999 breakdown can instantly date a record. Good sequencing tends not to care what year it is.

Put the 1995 and 1999 Essential Mixes back to back and you can hear progressive house itself changing around him. The production gets cleaner. The rooms get bigger. Trance gets closer. Warren just keeps doing the same annoying thing extremely well.

He waits.

And somehow the bastard still makes you wait with him.