Global Underground 009: San Francisco (CD1)
- Progressive House
- Progressive Trance
- Progressive
Dig this out if you only remember Sasha for the huge trance years. CD1 of 1998's Global Underground 009: San Francisco is him still deep in progressive house, with the brighter pull only arriving in the last three records. The first disc is a useful corrective to the idea that every late-90s Sasha mix was simply a parade of enormous melodic records. Much of the journey is in the darker, house-led terrain, with the release of tension arriving relatively late. Put it beside the Northern Exposure records and you can hear overlapping influences without pretending they're versions of one identical sound.
Global Underground 009: San Francisco is one of those Sasha mixes people remember as a giant late-90s statement, but CD1 is far more patient than that reputation suggests.
The release
San Francisco came out on 9 November 1998 on Boxed in the UK and Thrive in the US. It reached number 18 in the UK compilation chart, and when Global Underground ran a fan poll of the whole series in 2019, it came second, behind only Sasha's own Ibiza. CD1 is fourteen tracks, starting with a short intro.
A deep, psychedelic start
CD1 opens in deep, slightly psychedelic progressive territory rather than charging towards the big-room end of Sasha's record box. Freaky Chakra's Platform, over seven minutes long, and the brief Attaboy record Solid Space Business set a loose, rolling mood.
DJ Sakin's Protect Your Mind follows in the Van Bellen Mix, then Classified Project's Subculture in the Relaxation Mix and Medway's Resurrection in the Vibrations Dub Mix. That's where things start tightening up. This is progressive house in the original, useful sense: the disc keeps moving forward without needing to announce every change.
The middle stretch is full of shorter records doing link work: Slickmick's Spectral Analysis, Sneaky Alien's Blue Stream, Funk Function's Empress II, Travel's Bulgarian in the Incisions Remix and Joi Cardwell's Soul to Bare in a C. Hornbostel remix. None of them is a big name. All of them keep the room shifting a few degrees at a time.
The trance pull in the last twenty minutes
That restraint matters, because by 1998 Sasha was already associated with much bigger emotional records. It would have been easy to build the whole disc around obvious peaks. Instead, he saves them for the end.
The last three records are where the trance pull becomes hard to miss. Stoneproof's Everything's Not You comes in Quivver's Space Mix, which is a nice detail: Stoneproof and Quivver were both John Graham, so this is Graham remixing himself under another name. Morgan King's I'm Free follows in William Orbit's mix, nearly nine minutes long, and the disc closes on Libra presents Taylor's Anomaly – Calling Your Name in the Albion Mix. Albion was Ferry Corsten, whose own Albion record, Air, was everywhere in 1998.
It never feels like Sasha has suddenly switched genres, because the earlier records have been steering there all along.
Progressive house at a messy border
That's probably why San Francisco still works. It catches progressive house at the point where the borders were getting messy. The darker, dubby, psychedelic mid-90s sound is still in the room, but brighter trance textures are pushing through it, and trance producers like Ferry Corsten are turning up as remixers on progressive records. Sasha doesn't settle the argument. He just mixes across it.
CD2 pushes further in that direction, with Narcotik, Der Dritte Raum, Breeder, Paragliders, Jark Prongo, Tomcraft and Tilt, and it's where the harder, more trance-facing side of late-1998 Sasha lives.
Why it still holds up
The Global Underground city concept obviously adds to the mythology. But take away the sleeve and the nostalgia and CD1 still earns the attention, because the programming is bloody disciplined. It never feels desperate to prove it's important, and you can hear 1998 changing around Sasha without him having to beat you over the head with it.
Recommended if you like: GU013 Ibiza, Northern Exposure 2, Medway, Quivver and Albion: progressive house in its last stretch before trance really started pulling at it.
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