Shelley's Laserdome: the residency that made Sasha

By the winter of 1990, Sasha's Manhattan Heights tapes had made his name in the north, but his true residency was further south — at Shelley's Laserdome in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, where his weekly sets had become the stuff of legend.

The archive holds four of those nights: 28 January, 4 February, 8 February and 8 March 1991. Read together they show a DJ at the very top of the piano-house moment — Full Moon, Dionne, Jay Markay, Slam Slam — a sound that was still house, still four-to-the-floor, and already hinting at the faster, harder thing that would follow. These are the sets that Mixmag's 100th issue would celebrate as club music's summit.

Sasha left Shelley's in the spring of 1991. The venue closed later that year. But the tapes from those five months are the closest thing the era has to a studio document of a DJ becoming a sound.