This proper progressive house landmark got a bespoke – glow in the dark – vinyl repress for Record Store Day. Copies of the original go for crazy sums, and rightly so. While it’s certainly of its time, it’s also perhaps the pinnacle of the genre. Despite of, maybe because of its scarcity, it was hammered and completely crossed over. Released in 1992, Rocky & Diesel still included it in their classic 1997 Journeys By DJ mix. Only last month, Tony Humphries played it at Faith party. 

building from busy, buzzing circuitry and a hypnotic tabla loop, the kick, TB-303, snippets of Siobhan Fahey’s vocal, and fanfares like far away foghorns, each element is introduced, step-by-step, individually, incrementally. Symphonic strings soar, then get sharpened and made more intense, before, finally, after 10 minutes, the trip, shamanic and tribal, fades into the sound of distant bells tolling.*

Part of the incredible excitement generated is down to the fact that the remix was cut live, in one take. With all of the samples and parts loaded up on a huge desk, Underworld’s Darren Emerson and Rick Smith sparked off one another. Creating an incredible, electric dynamic as they fought to control switches and faders. There’s a real sense of them both being totally in the zone, and having fun. Knowing they were making something special.

*Within all this amazing, accumulating drama there’s a brief breakdown, that sounds just like old school acid house. On the RSD repress, Leo Zero zooms in on this to produce a couple of chugging, A Love From Outer Space-friendly edits.

….I’m sad to say that I sold my original copy. After nearly dying from internal haemorrhaging – I kid myself akin to Marty Scorsese– brought on by several summers too many of love / excess, I took all my scream-ups, prog and trance to the second-hand record store, Reckless, boxes and boxes of them, in an attempt to pretend that the last few years hadn’t happened. It was only nearly 3 decades later that I started buying bits and pieces back.