Northern Exposure 2 (CD1)

Northern Exposure 2 has the awkward job every good sequel gets stuck with: keep the thing people loved, but don’t just make the same fucking record again.

The first Northern Exposure in 1996 was loose, cold and genuinely strange in places. Its North disc could spend ages in ambience and broken rhythms before it felt remotely interested in behaving like a conventional club mix. That uncertainty was part of the magic.

A year later, CD1 of Northern Exposure 2 sounds more confident about what this whole project is supposed to be.

The edits are tighter. Breaks matter more. Progressive trance is much harder to treat as a side influence. The pair still care about atmosphere and gradual development, but the music feels as though it has started looking towards the larger rooms the progressive/trance crossover was filling by the late 1990s.

That does not mean the patience has disappeared.

Sasha & John Digweed are still doing the thing that made the partnership work: letting the relationship between records carry more weight than the individual highlights. A track can arrive quietly, sit for long enough to alter the mood, and then become important because of what follows it.

The difference is that Northern Exposure 2 is less interested in leaving you lost.

The first album sometimes feels like it enjoys making you wonder whether the dancefloor has been abandoned completely. The sequel still takes detours, but you can hear a firmer destination underneath them. Breakbeat sections connect more directly to progressive house and trance. Melodic material sits further forward. The overall disc feels edited rather than wandered into existence.

Depending on your taste, that is either an improvement or the exact thing the original did better.

I’m somewhere in the middle.

Northern Exposure has more mystery. Northern Exposure 2 is easier to live with as a mix. It gives up a little of the first record’s weirdness in exchange for momentum, and there are days when that is exactly what I want.

It is also a useful snapshot of progressive house changing around Sasha & Digweed rather than the pair simply changing on their own.

By 1997, trance was becoming much more visible in the big rooms. The border between progressive house and progressive trance was getting increasingly pointless to police. Producers were using bigger melodies and brighter textures without necessarily abandoning the slower, long-form pacing that had defined the earlier progressive sound.

Northern Exposure 2 sits right in that argument.

It is not a full-on trance compilation. It doesn’t suddenly start stacking euphoric breakdowns because the market has moved. But the pull is obvious, and the duo let it into the mix without throwing away the control underneath.

That makes CD1 especially useful beside the first Northern Exposure and the later Communicate.

Put those three next to each other and you can hear an entire relationship with the word ‘progressive’ changing. Northern Exposure is spacious and exploratory. Northern Exposure 2 is tighter and increasingly trance-facing. Communicate in 2000 turns darker, tougher and far more club-focused.

Same partnership. Different pressure around it.

And that is why I don’t think Northern Exposure 2 needs to beat the original to justify itself. It documents a different moment and does it bloody well.

If the first album is the one that makes you ask where the hell the mix is going, the sequel is the one that knows — it just still has enough manners not to tell you immediately.