Sasha and Digweed Launch Northern Exposure Vinyl Auction on 30th Anniversary

The Northern Exposure vinyl auction opens for bidding on 30 September, exactly three decades after Sasha and John Digweed’s foundational progressive mix series first arrived, offering collectors the working records, acetates and memorabilia that made those compilations what they were.

In partnership with Amplifyd, the pair are auctioning material drawn from the personal archives behind Northern Exposure, Northern Exposure 2, Northern Exposure: Expeditions and Communicate. The auction preview is already live, with bidding running through 21 October.

What the Northern Exposure Vinyl Auction Actually Contains

The sale is expected to encompass 100 to 125 lots, drawn equally from each artist’s collection. These are not collector’s copies preserved in sleeves. They are, as Sasha puts it, records that have been ‘carried around the world, pulled in and out of record boxes night after night.’ The wear is the point. ‘I love the fact that we’re not selling pristine museum pieces. We’re selling our copies,’ he says. ‘They’ve got writing on them, and the sleeves have marks or tears.’

Among the lots are records that became inseparable from the Northern Exposure experience: God Within’s ‘Raincry (Submerged)’, Scott Hardkiss’s atmospheric contribution to the North disc; Rabbit in the Moon’s ‘Out of Body Experience’; and Underworld’s ‘Dark and Long (Dark Train)’, which brought the South disc to its close. Later-era material is present too, including Breeder’s ‘Tyrantanic’, which opens Expeditions, and Space Manoeuvres’ ‘Stage One’.

One of the more revealing objects in the sale is a 45-rpm 777 Productions acetate of Delerium’s ‘Silence (Sanctuary Dub)’, complete with a handwritten label reading ‘Fade Remix (Dub 1)’, a reference to Chris Fortier’s Sanctuary alias, with a breakbeat version on the reverse. Digweed’s own archive produced another find: an acetate of ‘Dope on Plastic’, a particularly rare release he hadn’t expected to encounter in his collection.

Records as Memory, Not Museum Pieces

Sasha has roughly 40,000 records in his collection, and says that only around 250 have been sold through his previous Amplifyd auctions. Going back through the Northern Exposure material, he found the memories attached to these objects were not always directly about the music. The sleeves, handwriting, stickers, battered covers and the smell of an acetate could pull him back three decades. ‘It’s like opening an old box of photographs,’ he says. ‘The memories just come flooding back.’

That experience has also altered his sense of why the copies matter to fans when the recordings themselves are often still findable elsewhere. ‘What I hadn’t really considered was how much they meant to the people on the other side of the DJ booth,’ he says. Particular mixes and particular records carry weight because fans associate them with clubs, relationships, journeys and periods of their lives. Owning the copy Sasha or Digweed actually used to build one of those mixes creates a different order of connection.

Digweed initially felt ambivalent about parting with some of these pieces. He came around to the idea that the records could continue their lives with listeners who grasped their significance. ‘The fact that they want the vinyl so much means it must also have strong memories for them,’ he says.

Redux, Reissue and the Broader Anniversary

The auction arrives just days after Northern Exposure Redux, a remastered reissue on CD and vinyl with a deluxe box set, released on 25 September through LateNightTales. According to 909 Originals, Darren Emerson has contributed a new version of Underworld’s ‘Dark and Long’ for the Redux release, closing the second disc, adding a fresh dimension to the track that ended the original South disc all those years ago.

The distinction between the two releases is instructive. Where the reissue returns the music to circulation in cleaned-up form, the Amplifyd auction puts the physical history behind that music into the hands of collectors. The Northern Exposure series emerged, in Sasha’s words, from a desire to ‘take some of that music, alongside all these other strange and beautiful records we were finding, and somehow piece it together into one journey. A soundtrack. Something you could lose yourself in, disappear into.’ Touring America in the mid-1990s had exposed the pair to breakbeat sounds from Florida, particularly Tampa, Orlando and Miami, as well as music from the West Coast and San Francisco, and that geographic breadth fed directly into the series’ restless eclecticism.

Sasha and Digweed continue to perform together on select occasions, with dates scheduled in Mexico City on 2 October and Dallas the following day. As for the anniversary itself, Sasha remains clear about what matters most: ‘The fact that people are still talking about it and are excited about hearing it again 30 years later is really all we could have wanted.’ Bidding in the Northern Exposure vinyl auction opens 30 September.