Global Underground 004: Oslo (CD2)

Global Underground 004: Oslo is a useful reminder that Paul Oakenfold’s record box in 1997 was still all over the bloody place.

The full release moves through drum & bass, progressive house, trance and Goa material, which makes it one of the harder early Global Underground volumes to reduce to a neat genre label. For The Mix Archive, CD2 is where it really gets interesting.

Bedrock’s ‘Forbidden Zone’ opens the disc with a sound that still has one foot in progressive house: long structures, darker atmosphere and enough space for the mix to settle before it starts reaching for anything bigger. From there Cruzeman and Atlantic Ocean move it gradually towards firmer trance territory.

By the time Taucher and the later Goa-leaning records arrive, you can hear the direction Oakenfold’s sets would take over the following couple of years much more clearly. Astral Projection at the harder psychedelic end makes the connection especially obvious. But this isn’t yet the streamlined peak-time trance Oakenfold people remember from 1999.

That is exactly why Oslo is worth hearing.

Oakenfold had always been comfortable moving between styles. The Balearic years, Future, Spectrum and his wider club career had taught him not to treat genre boundaries as walls. GU004 catches that instinct at a moment when trance is starting to become the strongest gravity in the room but hasn’t completely taken over.

The progressive pacing underneath it is important too. Records are still allowed to run. The changes happen across long stretches rather than through a constant cycle of breakdown, payoff, next tune. Even when CD2 gets more obviously trance-facing, it doesn’t suddenly behave like a late-90s festival compilation.

That makes it a much better bridge between the Goa Mix and the Homelands-era Oakenfold than the title ‘Global Underground Oslo’ might suggest.

It is not the GU release I’d hand somebody first. San Francisco, Ibiza or some of the Warren volumes are easier ways into the series. Oslo is more interesting when you already know what Oakenfold became.

Then you can hear him halfway there — still eclectic, still slightly unruly, and increasingly unable to resist the bloody trance records.