Why Deep Dish’s Yoshiesque Is One of the Most Underrated Progressive House Mixes Ever…

In the pantheon of progressive house DJ mixes, Yoshiesque is rarely mentioned. Deep Dish’s double-disc masterpiece often lingers at the edges; respected, certainly, but seldom mythologized.

That honour is typically reserved for mixes ranging from the mythic sprawl of Northern Exposure to the futuristic highs of Balance 005, compilations that have entered genre lore, passed down like sacred texts in clubland’s progressive canon.

Yoshiesque, though, is conspicuously absent from that conversation. Maybe it’s a matter of timing. 1999 was swollen with releases (Discogs lists over 650 progressive mixes that year alone) as the genre stormed towards its commercial peak and a creative zenith. In a year so densely populated with giants, even a masterpiece risked being overlooked.

How Yoshiesque Stood Out in a Year of Progressive House Giants

Trawl Discogs more and you’ll discover that 1999 saw Sasha and Digweed extend their seminal groundbreaking series with Northern Exposure: Expeditions; Anthony Pappa made his Renaissance debut; Digweed launched the Bedrock mix series; Danny Howells introduced Nocturnal Frequencies; and Global Underground dropped 5 mixes in their city series (including Sasha in Ibiza and Danny Tenaglia in London).

And anchoring it all were two tracks that became genre cornerstones: Sasha “Xpander” and Bedrock “Heaven Scent.”

That was the ocean of music Deep Dish sailed into with Yoshiesque. It arrived without a hit parade of festival anthems or the backing of a flagship series.

Released through React, a label more known for high-BPM trance than slow-burn deep house, the compilation stood apart: a quietly self-contained outlier, aligned with neither the progressive mainstream nor React’s high-octane lineage.

Even its cover felt like a quiet rebellion. At a time when mix CDs doubled as self-branding exercises (moody portraits, bold fonts, names as logos) Yoshiesque landed with no face and no flair. Just a neon slipcase and a clear message: inside is something that is Yoshiesque and Deep Dish is involved with it.

Even the Morse code-style typography hinted at something covert and coded (fun fact: the Morse code indeed spells out Deep Dish). At a time when DJs were becoming personalities, Deep Dish quietly insisted on anonymity.

Deep Dish’s Early Sound: From West Coast House to BBC Essential Mix

Before Yoshiesque, the duo—Ali “Dubfire” Shirazinia and Sharam Tayebi—dabbled in more tech-focused sounds through compilations Cream Separates and DJ’s Take Control. Both were steeped in the tougher textures of West Coast House: gritty, percussive, and functional.

Their 1998 BBC1 Essential Mix, however, transmitted the clearest signal of what laid ahead. Tonally that two-hour mix veered closer to deep house and dub techno than late-’90s prog. It was dark, fluid, and pressure-packed, a two-hour descent into the Mariana Trench of tech. Less hands-in-the-air, more shoe-gaze.

It was an effortlessly cool sound completely in sync with their pseudonym—and a rewarding evolution of what came before.

It stood out.

Deep Dish’s Musical Perspective

Some of that idiosyncrasy feels inseparable from perspective. As Iranian-born immigrants raised in the U.S., both Deep Dish members inhabited a different cultural orbit. They drew from a broader map of sonic memory than most of their peers.

Sharam recalled how growing up in Iran, his earliest exposure to Western music came through bootleg movie soundtracks, a contraband lifeline to another world. One of those movies was a neon-drenched 80’s drama whose soundtrack included Shandi Sinnamon ‘He’s a Dream‘.

Years later, that song, half-buried in the cultural echo of the 80s cinema classic, Flashdance, would form the foundation for what became Deep Dish’s most recognisable and biggest crossover track.

Deep Dish and Yoshitoshi Records

Those same eclectic, boundary-blurring instincts shaped their label, Yoshitoshi, which never subscribed to a fixed definition of house or progressive or techno or anything else for that matter.

Its release schedule fluctuated from old-school to acid house, wonky tech to 140 BPM plus house, sometimes all in the same track. There was no rigid blueprint for what they signed, only an intuitive mandate: it had to feel right. It had to feel Yoshiesque.

That gut instinct carried through to the final tracklist of their neon-hued masterpiece. And if you assumed the 2CD release would serve as a promotional vehicle for Yoshitoshi Records, you’d be mistaken.

Of the 30-plus tracks featured, only five were officially released through the label.

Yoshiesque: a Masterclass in DJ Mix Storytelling

Still, Yoshiesque reflected the label’s pluralistic ethos. Less a genre snapshot than a musical mood board, it was calibrated to a specific emotional frequency.

Across two discs, Deep Dish balanced texture and theatrics, not by chasing peaks, but by chiseling moments which allowed momentum to accumulate like pages in a novel.

That immersion echoed the pacing of their club sets.

By then, Deep Dish were known for marathon DJ sets, often playing six hours or more. Yoshiesque somehow condensed that arc into CD format without flattening its dynamics. The track selection wasn’t just about matching keys or tempos, it was about sustaining, shifting, and recalibrating mood.

Where many mixes of the era settled into a single emotional tone and rode it to the end, Yoshiesque wasn’t afraid to veer off-course—sometimes within a single transition.

It makes for a gripping listen.

Why Yoshiesque Still Resonates

There’s a tendency to define classic mixes by their cultural moment, their anthems, or the stature of the artist behind them. Yoshiesque complicates that logic.

It feels sealed off and filled with music that belongs to a magical world Deep Dish built exclusively for this mix. At a time when progressive house was growing more grandiose, they offered something slower, cooler and arguably more enduring. It’s a delicious dish – and a deep one at that.

Sometimes, creative visions become so distinct they generate their own shorthand. Here, Deep Dish’s particular strain of atmospheric, emotionally intelligent house was inventive enough to gift progressive its own neologism. A genre within a genre: Yoshiesque.

Stay tuned for our deep dive into CD1.

Deep Dish at Barbarellas artwork