Sasha details how to ‘read’ a crowd…

In this interview with Skiddle, from 2015, Sasha turns back the clock to recall warehouse raves in Blackpool and Blackburn, his alliance with longtime cohort John Digweed, and his Shelley’s Laserdome residency in Stoke, which would lay the foundations for his now three decade career…

The artist formerly known as Alexander Coe also defines the art of ‘reading the crowd’, which in an era of push-button, USB drive, DJing by numbers, is a fast becoming a lost art.

“There’s a time for slamming mixes in, making it obvious that you’re going to drop the next record and there’s a time to wind people in to a hypnotic groove, where the transitions are very slick.

“If you’re playing at a festival you want people to know your next record is coming in and it’s going to make a bang, because it’s about that anticipation, the build up and the release. When you’re playing at a festival people don’t want to hear smooth transitions. They don’t want to hear something very slick and subtle, they want to hear what you’re doing.

“Whereas if you’re at Fabric at seven o’clock in the morning and you’re trying out new music, messing around with new sounds, you want to be able to get lost in that hypnotic thing and you want it to be as slick as possible.”

Sets such as this one, from Shelley’s in 1991, helped shape Sasha’s style – while often labelled as a ‘progressive house’ DJ, followers of his career will know that he works from a far broader canvas. [Kudos to Sarah Davies for the upload]