Interview with Sasha

Also a guy I want to work with is Salif Keita who's an African singer -- his voice is so incredible.

DJ TIMES: Are you planning to work with Brian?
SASHA: Yea, yea -- we're currently working on a track. He's coming over to England for a couple of months this Summer, so I'm sure we're going to be knocking some stuff off while he's over.

(BRIAN IS AUDIBLY EXICTED IN THE BACKGROUND BY BLASTING THE TRACK THEY"RE WORKING ON -- SASHA PUTS THE PHONE NEARER TO THE SPEAKERS SO WE CAN HAVE A LISTEN)

DJ TIMES: When did you start your partnership with John DIgweed?
SASHA: Just as I was leaving Renaissance. I left the club about six months before the first mix CD came out.

DJ TIMES: How long was your residency at Renaissance?
SASHA: About a year and a half, two years. With residencies, I get into a place, and they get so good, but the press starts hyping the shit out of it and it goes a little bit off the bull from there. I have such fond memories of the first year there. On the down-side, I was doing really long sets every Saturday night that I was abusing my body way too much every weekend that I just had to knock it on the head for a while.

DJ TIMES: Did you spin in tandem with Digweed at Renaissance?
SASHA: Yes. Musically, he blew my mind. The first tapes he sent up to me I was like 'fuck! what's this guy about?' and we just met and straightaway we did a set together --a one-on-one thing for the last hour and it was just like we got on with each other and it's been like that ever since. It's mental, our DJ-ing flows so well when we play together that I guess people on the floor don't even know who's playing, which I think is just so cool.

DJ TIMES: How long have you been a duo?
SASHA: It's got to be going on three years now...

DJ TIMES: What about your mix-CD Northern Exposure?
SASHA: We're working on the follow-up right now, but the first one is coming out in America finally. It's a bit difficult for me to get excited about it as it was finished quite a long time ago. We're gonna follow it up here straight away with the second one so that the American label don't have to compete with imports, and to also accurately reflect where myself and John are at now.

DJ TIMES: A lot of those songs that are on the first compilation, are they yours and John's anthems over the years? A lot of them are not exactly the newest stuff, but everything is still top regardless.
SASHA: That's the whole idea behind Northern Exposure. To choose records that we loved. There are so many mix CDs that come out which are only the hits -- the latest club tracks. A year later, who knows if you are going to want to listen to that stuff because you heard those songs on 50,000 other compilations.

DJ TIMES: It's not every disc that has "Out of Body Experience" by Rabbit in the Moon or Apollo 440's "Liquid Cool" on it.
SASHA: That Rabbit guy is so talented. I love all his shit!

DJ TIMES: That CD is excellently mixed -- did you do it live or in the studio?
SASHA: We dd it in the studio on Pro-Tools. There's a lot of tricks we used on there that we couldn't have done live. We were looping certain records and feeding them into filter banks through synths and stuff like that. There's something to be said about the live mix-CD, but this was just something that I wanted to do because I had just got Pro-Tools in the studio and I kind of realised that there was a way to do a mix CD where you could do all the tricks that we did on it.

DJ TIMES: Does the public know that Northern Exposure isn't a 'live' mix CD but a studio concoction?
SASHA: I think it's fairly obvious that it's not live. I certainly don't know any DJs who can do what we did on that disc live. Not myself, at least.

DJ TIMES: It definitely was a faultless mix. I couldn't tell if it was live or not. All I've ever heard about you is that you're a seamless mixing DJ. I hear it a lot from the Orlando people. How did you get such a great reputation down there?