90's House & Garage Vol. 3 - Compiled by Jeremy Underground

First of all, I'll start with some warm thanks for Dave Lee & Tim Burnett, I'm really grateful for the opportunity to do this compilation. Looks like the idea was born at a Liverpool show we played together in October 2021!

My third house compilation is here and the rules are a bit different compared to the two previous ones I did back in 2014 and 2016: the main selection factor here was to choose tracks that haven't been re-released digitally (not on Traxsource/Beatport/Bandcamp, not on Spotify and so on) So that's the case with this collection, and at the time of writing (March 2024), some of these original records are not especially hard to find in second hand. Yet you can still look at the vinyl pack version of this compilation with interest: I've tried my best to bring some 'added value' to these old tunes: most of them are edited, some even have a tiny bit of additional production over them. I'm aware this might not please some purists, but my wish is for these tracks to be played out in clubs in 2024 - they need a chance to compete when they're being played close to current loud modern tracks!

(All these "edits" have been approved with the rights owners of course)

Now some explanation about the sleeve! I had this idea of a picture of a stack of killer "90's House" records - fact is only a very few house records have information written on the spine. Most sleeves are plain black or white! Those with info on the spine are mostly albums or remixes released on major labels. So, I searched though my collection and put this stack… for the nerds to look closer! The picture of these spines is supposed to symbolize "House" - yet it's NOT the playlist of this comp.

Back to the music content, I care about sound quality, so I wanna be fully transparent here, we couldn't get clean DAT masters for all of the tracks, so we had to go with vinyl rips for some. I worked hard to try to get rid of all typical "vinyl rip flaws"; and at the end it's not perfect for some, yet that's the best we could do. For club use all tracks are just fine. Musically speaking, in the end the playlist is quite soulful, more soulful than my two previous house comps. It's intentional here, I feel like most of the music has gone harder and faster since Covid, a lot of DJ's who were at 125bpm are now playing at 130bpm…I decided to go the other way around and fight against the wind. This weird current world needs more melodies and beautiful vocals!

Coming after Dave Lee in this series brought extra pressure too, as I'm younger and less experienced. Yet I've tried to express my sensibility and bring my personal vision - and I hope that many of you will enjoy this selection.