Once upon a time, in the words of De La Soul, everyone wanted to be a DJ. Throughout the early 1990s, Irish clubs were touted in glossy magazines worldwide as the places to be and new venues opened almost weekly to cater for the demand and to have a slice of the action. Naturally, there was a massive follow-on increase in the sales of Technics turntables and white-label 12inches as the new breed of DJ began to develop the skills they hoped would pay the bills. A few years on, everyone still wants to be a DJ but now there's also a desire to be a producer. What's the point in shelling out your hard-earned money to buy tunes by someone else when you can do the same thing in your home studio and become a superstar in the process? The logic, it seems, is that if David Holmes can do it, other DJs-turned-artists can also reap the benefits. If only it were that simple . . .

That DJs are working in the studio has been abundantly clear to observers of the Irish dance scene for some time, with labels such as D1, Influx, Quadraphonic and Ultramack mapping the results. Now comes the high-profile proof as Sounds Of The Irish Underground, a 12-track compilation from a Sony Music subsidiary, Higher Ground, which aims to take it to another level.

It features the aforementioned Holmes and Wall Of Sound stalwarts, the Dirty Beatniks, but there are 10 other names here which may not be so familiar to you. As well as sharing an Irish identity, the tracks and artists also share a loose generic thread. This is for the breakbeat and drum 'n' bass population: the house and techno sectors will have to look elsewhere. This doesn't appear to have been a result of an exclusion policy, but had more to do with honing the album's sound for a specific constituency. Indeed, you could compile a worthy four-corners second compilation from some of the people who are missing from here - UK Top 30 stars, Agnelli and Nelson, from the north, the mesmeric grooves of Bass Odyssey from the south, Ireland's own DJ Shadow, Hazo, (aka Paul Hayes) from the west and the likes of Rob Rowland, Deep Burial and Decal from the east. Hugh Murray, A&R manager with Sony Ireland and one of the people who compiled this album, agrees. "There's more than enough material out there for another compilation and it's all quality stuff," he says. "In the end, we had to decide to stick with the tracks we had. I didn't know until I went out to source the material that there was so much out there. It was the stuff that I was getting from the bedroom producers that impressed me more than some of the stuff I was getting from the dance labels here."

Nonetheless, the dance labels perform a vital function. Not least because labels such as the drum 'n' bass Quadraphonic (represented here by Sychronic) and the burgeoning Influx (whose acts include Romin and Resinated) have been helping the new school of producers to leave their bedrooms and think about the future. More than most, Influx's Johnny Moy is in a position to see this. One of the few Irish DJs to make a mark abroad, he has seen this situation coming. "A couple of years ago, you wouldn't have got this but people now want to produce their own tracks as well as DJ. It has become part and parcel of the whole vibe.

"This is the first wave because there have never been so many Irish producers before." Moy himself is something of an experienced hand in the studio, releasing singles on Red and Influx, remixing everyone from David Holmes to U2, and popping up here as Resinated. But he is at pains to point out that the album isn't the last word in Irish dance music: "You can't exclude any sound or style from a definition of Irish music. It's everything that's on the album plus all the techno and house and electro stuff as well." But what exactly will the album do for the participants, many of whom have already had other releases of their own? "It's a priority project for Sony here and in the UK," Hugh Murray says. "We've put an awful lot of time into it."

So will there be another one? "It depends on the success of this one. I don't know if any of the acts on the album will end up getting signed to Sony as a result. A lot of them will start being asked to do remixes and we'll see what other tracks they'll come up with."

Of course, for many of the acts, getting signed is not the object of the exercise at all. They're self-sufficient, surviving and thriving by DJing or engineering while working away on their own projects. Leo Pearson is one of this number. He runs Peak Studios, where many of the tracks on the compilation were recorded, releases singles on Howie B's Pussyfoot label as Inevidence (with Stephen Mulhall) and on Influx as Romin, plots world domination with post-big-beat combo, Invisible Armies, and has also found the time to remix U2's Mofo and run his own label. It's quite a hectic workload, but Pearson sees nothing unusual about this amount or variety of activities. "Round here in Monkstown where I live, all the kids I've grown up with are doing much the same thing. They're DJing or they're making their own tracks. That's one of the reasons I started the studio in the first place, to give my mates a chance to record and then release their tunes."

He's realistic about what Sounds Of The Irish Underground means for him. "The main advantage is publicity. If this gets Irish acts some international attention, brilliant. The market here is too small to sustain the scene, we need international exposure. People have been so down on the Irish dance scene that something like this should be a cause for celebration. "Despite the efforts of some people, the scene has survived. Now we have to take it abroad. Yeah, there have been plans before to do something like this but they didn't come to anything. I think what Sony have done is to wait for the timing to be right."

Sounds Of The Irish Underground is out on Higher Ground/Sony