Global Underground 009: San Francisco (CD1)

Global Underground 009: San Francisco is one of those Sasha mixes people remember as a giant late-90s statement, but CD1 is actually far more patient than that reputation suggests.

Released in 1998, it opens in deep, slightly psychedelic progressive territory rather than charging straight towards the big-room end of Sasha’s record box. Freaky Chakra’s ‘Platform’ and Attaboy’s ‘Solid Space Business’ establish a loose, rolling mood before DJ Sakin, Classified Project and Medway start tightening things up. It is progressive house in the original useful sense of the phrase: the disc keeps moving forward without needing to announce every change.

That restraint matters because Sasha was already becoming associated with much bigger emotional records by this point. It would have been easy to build the whole mix around obvious peaks. Instead, CD1 spends most of its running time letting tracks do the boring-but-important work of changing the room a few degrees at a time.

The second half is where the trance pull becomes harder to miss. Stoneproof’s ‘Everything’s Not You’, Morgan King’s ‘I’m Free’ in the William Orbit mix and Libra presents Taylor’s ‘Anomaly — Calling Your Name’ bring more melody and lift, but the transition never feels like Sasha has suddenly switched genres because the earlier material has been steering there all along.

That is probably why San Francisco still works. It catches progressive house at a 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. Sasha doesn’t resolve the argument. He just mixes across it.

The Global Underground city concept adds another layer to the mythology, obviously. San Francisco became one of the most remembered releases in the series, and later fan polls have kept it near the top of the GU catalogue. But strip the silver sleeve and nostalgia away and CD1 still earns the attention because the programming is bloody disciplined.

It never feels desperate to prove it is important.

That is the bit I like most. You can hear 1998 changing around Sasha without him having to beat you over the head with it.