Any proceeds will go to teenagecancertrust.org
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Between 1993 and 1997, like many other people I fell in love with Jungle in all its many forms. Growing up on the outskirts of Reading, Basement Records became my new Mecca - a location, like all the best musical hot spots, simultaneously joyous and terrifying. After visiting enough times to become a bit of a known person, DJ Lee started encouraging me and my friends to go to Metalheadz. It took us a couple of months to pluck up the courage but once we did everything seemed to click into place and we started driving up to Hoxton Square in my barely legal Renault 5 any Sunday evening that we could.

Everyone knows what a legendary night it was and we often threw ourselves into the dance floor so hard, we’d emerge at midnight in a daze, pile into my car and I’d take the wrong turn out of Hoxton Square, driving north up the A10 and adding an extra hour onto our journey home.

As a budding producer, around 1996 I was able to buy an Emu ESI 32 sampler and combined with various bits of kit gathered playing in bands, I started making my own jungle tracks. I was trying to reach the lofty heights of musical inspirations such as DJ Fokus, Photek and Foul Play but also getting carried away with the emerging harder sound which initially appealed to my inner noise-rock kid before realising it was killing everything I had originally loved about the sound; the unrestrained creativity that could be achieved within those classic breaks, pure sine b-lines and early 90s presets.

These tracks were the best of the ones I made around that time. I never did anything with them apart from play them to friends, feeling that they didn't reach the same quality as the artists I aspired to match. But digging them out again 25 years later, I found myself enjoying listening to them and with an amazing mastering job from my friend Chris at Blacklisted Mastering, I’m now old enough to not give a toss and am happy to release them into the world, paying back some of the countless hours I spent hunched up in front my sampler and a cracked copy of Cubase.

I hope you dig these and if you were there too, they bring back a few emotions of that crazy, inspiring time.