Sasha

North Wales native Sasha emerged as one of the planet’s most celebrated and widely embraced DJs through his accessible blends of house, techno, and trance. Beginning his career in the late ’80s as a club spinner, the former Alexander Coe secured his initial major opportunity after being engaged by the dance venue Shelly’s to play and reinterpret contemporary hits of the era. There the youthful selector gained recognition among dance and house audiences, yet it was his sets at the Haçienda and Renaissance that elevated him to national recognition and, in time, international stature.

While still performing at Renaissance, Sasha encountered fellow DJ John Digweed. The pair formed a remixing partnership and soon issued the debut installment of Northern Exposure, a sequence of mix albums that doubled as compilations of the duo’s reworkings for other producers. They supported the project with tours that took them to the U.S., Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Sasha nevertheless declined to confine himself to DJ duties; he teamed with vocalist Maria Naylor on the U.K. Top 20 pop single “Be as One” and supplied remixes for prominent acts including the Pet Shop Boys, Simply Red, and M People. He also launched his own imprint, Excession Recordings, and contributed original material to Deconstruction.

Another Sasha + John Digweed collection, Northern Exposure, Vol. 2, surfaced in late 1997 and was offered in distinct East Coast and West Coast editions, each featuring entirely different track listings. He continued to deliver solo mix packages as well, among them multiple entries in the Global Underground series covering San Francisco and Ibiza. A scarce studio outing, the Xpander EP, achieved dancefloor success in 1999. The following year saw the release of the mix album Communicate, while 2002 brought an American contract with Kinetic and the appearance of his first full-length production effort, Airdrawndagger. His subsequent major project, Involver, merged mix-album and production formats by presenting exclusive reworkings of material from UNKLE and Ulrich Schnauss, among others. One of those inclusions, Felix da Housecat’s “Watching Cars Go By,” earned a Grammy nomination in the Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical category. Further volumes titled Invol2ver and Invol<3r followed in 2008 and 2013. A stylistic shift titled Scene Delete, comprising a continuous suite of ambient productions, appeared via LateNightTales in 2016. A companion remix collection, Scene Delete: Remixes #3, arrived the next year. Sasha kept issuing singles, among them joint efforts with Polica (“Out of Time”), Dems (“True”), and Alan Fitzpatrick (“El Jefe”), rounding out the decade with releases such as 2019’s “The Lights.”