The album? Northern Exposure.

Growing up, I never cared about “music”. The radio was boring to me. I got sick of hearing the same four instruments over and over again. I tried to pretend to like the songs everyone else did, but I just didn’t care.

Then I played the video game Wipeout 3 for PlayStation 1, and my whole world changed. Not only did Wipeout’s bleak technological vision of the future feel accurate to me, the music was haunting. And one track in particular always made me want to race faster. That track was Xpander.

That is still the context in which my entire life’s work and passion lives today! When I talk about AI and the future, truly it’s because of this.

So I had to search for this obscure British DJ named Sasha, and I found Northern Exposure and his Global Underground mixes. It took me ages of traveling around the state to find someone who sold these albums in Colorado, in a time when no one within a hundred miles of me seemed to know this type of music, and everything electronic was called techno, and techno was “Moby”, and we were supposed to hate techno because Eminem hated Moby. Yes, I was in my element alright in middle school.

But hearing this album for the first time completely changed my definition of what music was or could be. There were no gaps between songs. There were sounds and textures I’d never heard before, that were far more interesting and futuristic than a guitar/ukulele clap combination for the millionth time. From that moment on, you never saw me without a Walkman and headphones on, listening to electronic music every waking hour.

For 30 years, Sasha and John Digweed have been the soundtrack of my entire life. And anyone who knows me well knows that’s true!

That passion led me to help build one of the world’s largest dance music blogs in the early 2010s, it led me to DJ in college and ultimately around the world, it brought me to work at one of the world’s top dance record labels in Armada Music in Amsterdam, and it’s the reason I built courses on how to DJ that have reached over 30,000 students on Udemy.

No matter what I’ve done my entire life, from then until now, you won’t find me without headphones on listening to this kind of music.

And today my copy of the 30-year anniversary re-release of this iconic album arrived, in CD format of course, meaning I can’t sell my car in case my next one doesn’t have a CD player anymore. And yes, the original Sasha and Digweed CDs haven’t left my car for 30 years, it’s true, just ask my wife!

So if you’re not familiar with these guys, dive into their world, starting with the album from 1996 that didn’t just change me, it changed the entire music industry. It’s out tomorrow, September 25th, 2026. All these massive festivals you see around you on social media today wouldn’t be what they are without these two legends. So support them, put on some headphones, and to Sasha and Digweed, thanks for giving a 90s kid a reason to finally love music in Podunksville, Colorado.