Making music isn’t easy. Sure, anyone can throw down a kick drum loop and some snares and call it a ‘tune’, but if you want to make a track that’s going to achieve something then you’re going to have to put in some work. After you’ve cut off you mates, lost your girlfriend, gone so pale the local smackheads give you a wide berth (and spent the last year torn between a sine wave and a square tooth wave), you’ve got to ask yourself why you are putting yourself through such head-mangling intensity.
Some producers are in it for the money – and you can hear it a mile off – while some want the buzz of seeing a dancefloor lose it to their track. There are those that do it as a badge of honour and others who want to be famous.
Josh Wink, however, is an artist. While your parents might complain that house and techno is nothing more than a torturous racket, the acid king sees dance music as no different to literature, theatre or the visual arts. For him it’s a process of being plugged into the world around you, taking influences from everything that touches you and finding people who will help you understand the world in new ways. So it’s fitting that rather than find a corner of a sweaty club to have a quick chat and a manic dance we’ve met up to go to dinner.
Josh is rather a fan of good food and cooking, and despite most American’s insistence that there is nothing decent in English cuisine he’s eager to get stuck into that most British of dishes – a curry. With his brash, bushy hair and lean physique there can be few people in the dance music industry who look as healthy as the Philadelphia producer, and that’s because his state of mind is matched by his state of body. Heading straight for the vegetable section of the menu he explains that he hasn’t eaten meat since ’83. He also famously doesn’t take drugs, drink booze (or in fact milk) or wear animal products. But as the chicken dishes increasingly catch our eye, Josh is quick to point out that we’re not due for a lecture.
“I do what I do because it works for me,” he says. “I’m a vegetarian because feel happier that way, I’m a firm believer in you are what you eat, and what you do to yourself reflects how you are and how you act. That’s just me. I don’t preach it. I don’t say that if you eat dairy products or meat you’re a bad person. If someone asks me I’ll tell them my stance.”
He goes on to say that while he doesn’t take drugs, he’s not anti them, per se – he just feels happier not on them. Back in the days when the frenzied breakdowns and frantic acid of ‘Higher States Of Consciousness’ and ‘Are You Ready?’ were driving the gurners into spasms, it was a shock to some people that a tea totaller could lock into that frame of mind. Josh reckons he gets the same euphoric buzz off the music that others get off the pills.
These days people come up to him at gigs and explain that after getting into his music they try out the drug free lifestyle and often emerge clear headed and more full of life.
“When I hear that it’s awesome,” Josh smiles. “But when I go to a gig I don’t look at people trying to work out who’s fucked. I can’t tell a lot of the time anyway.”
After years of making complex and varied albums that would confuse his acid crazed fans with ambient tracks, drum & bass and spoken word pieces, Josh has finally made an album of intense 303-driven stompers. It’s typical that just as we get used to where he’s coming from he moves the goal posts again.
“I’ve never made an album like this before because I always thought it was too boring to listen – or make – an album of just full on tracks.”
But there’s nothing boring about ’20 To 20’ – from end to end it’s an exquisite assault of the eardrums, taking in influences from the mid to late 80s and tweaking them into the futuristic sounds of the coming apocalypse. Blended together as one non-stop aural attack, the album is actually made up of Josh’s secret weapon collection from the last five years. After half a decade of people coming to the booth to find out that the hell that noise is, he’s decided to collect them all together and give them to the public. And while we wait for its release Justin Robertson, D’Julz and Laurent Garnier have all been including them in their sets.
But despite the album dropping just as all the four to the floor producers have gone retro crazy, Wink doesn’t see himself as part of an acid house revival.
“Wanting to be in trends…” he ponders. “The question is, are you going to be the rock, or be the water in the stream. Are you going to go with the flow or are you going to make a stand and control things.”
Making a stand with ’20 To 20’ is ‘Profound Sounds Vol 2’ a double disc mix with a difference. The first part is the mix CD and the second part is a film about how Josh made the compilation. For most mix CDs that wouldn’t be very interesting to say the least, but this one’s a little different. After he licensed the tracks he made his own Josh Wink edits – the same as he does with all the tracks he plays out. He made the kicks a little more punchy, extended areas, made the tracks more DJ friendly and “added little Wink things to them”.
“The whole thing about this compilation was not compromising the integrity of the original tracks,” he explains. “It’s like getting a really beautiful suit, but you want the arms shortening a bit or the buttons somewhere else. You’re tailoring it to fit you but you’re not compromising the integrity of the suit.”
After finishing the re-edits he dropped them into Final Scratch and mixed the disc live in the studio with a sampler, effects units and drum machine.
“The bonus CD got mixed reactions,” he says. “A lot of people were like, Why did you tell people what you did? It’s important for me to let people know that the process in the final art project is just as important as the art itself.”
Josh may well not be used to the criticism lately because, well, he hasn’t really seemed to be around for a while. Even when his steamhammer club monster ‘Superfreak’ – which is included on ’20 To 20’ – was battering down the doors of every decent club a year ago we didn’t see anything of him in the press. He says that part of it is because he is no longer the flavour of the month, but that also it’s a conscious decision.
“I had a lot of success with a series of my songs and I didn’t really like the attributes that came about from it, or people’s expectations. I chose to sit back and be a little bit more – I don’t want to say reclusive – exclusive maybe.”
Back in the late 80s Josh was much more interested in courting the press for attention but a lot of magazines have changed what they’re about, making dance music the soundtrack to a drugs adventure rather than the journey itself.
“Magazines seem to be more concerned with making a reality sit-com of electronic music – you know, follow this DJ and see how many girls he can pull and how much gak he can do. It’s not really my thing.”
There’s none of that behaviour tonight as the most wicked part of the evening is when he tries to persuade us to try his curried Lady’s Fingers, a vegetable so foul that even Gordon Ramsey went on Room 101 to condone it. Josh though is fascinated, simply because it’s new and different. The tough green skin isn’t appealing to us though, and we dive back to the chicken.
“King [Britt, fellow Philly dweller and old partner in Ovum] reads a lot of press,” Josh continues. “I find a lot of what is going on through him. I seem to be more concerned with getting the artists on Ovum into these magazines to get them reviewed than my own stuff. That’s more fun to me. Everything is a balance, you take what you need and you leave what you don’t want.”
Excellent advice, we think as we push the Lady’s Fingers to one side.
Both the ‘Profound Sounds’ and ’20 To 20’ CDs are coming out on Ovum with no help or hindrance from major labels. Although last year he licensed the Lil’ Louis-sampling ‘How’s Your Evening So Far?’ to ffrr, it’s not a route he sounds too keen on perusing these days.
“Most of my stuff I was used to having licensing, becoming exploited, bastardised and big,” he exclaims spitting the last word like the concept has left a bad taste in his mouth (maybe it’s the Lady’s Fingers). “We not doing it that way. We not getting as much exposure as when we used to had Mercury or Virgin behind us, but its very important for me that just the right people know about it. And it’s kinda cool because it fells like being underground. Because everything is so tangible now, everybody has access to everything.”
The downside of the independent route is that it’s so hard at the moment to make money. In addition to the lack of media support in America – radio won’t touch dance music – file sharing is making it more and more difficult to keep the label afloat [see side bar]. Josh says that most of his DJing money goes into Ovum, calling it “my passion and my poison”. From the way Josh is talking it sounds unlikely that dance music is ever going to take off the way it took off in Europe. It comes down to the very differing attitudes to drink and drugs between the two territories.
“A big part of why it hasn’t grown is because of our drinking laws,” Josh believes. “You have to be 21 years of age to get into an alcoholic atmosphere like a club or a bar, which is where you listen to this music in Britain. So for the important cognitive years, in which you develop what you like and what you don’t like, people aren’t exposed to dance music.”
He goes on to explain that politics, drugs, sensationalism and “lack of culture” has meant that raves don’t really happen any more. In Britain, if someone dies from ecstasy it might make the front pages of the papers but then things die down. Josh says it doesn’t work that way in America – it becomes a witch-hunt and everything gets shut down.
“My feeling is it’s a stage in people’s lives. People go out to the clubs, they may do their drugs but they end up getting older, not going to the clubs anymore, not doing the drugs and life moves on. I don’t think that they’re aware of that in America.”
But Josh still focuses his attentions on his home territory where, he says, there are good clubs and good scenes. However it’s not as saturated as it is here, which can be good thing.
“I’m not saying I want America the same as dance culture is in Britain. It’s as easy as going to McDonalds in the UK, there’s no escape from it.”
As someone who should be in Roland’s TB-303 Hall Of Fame, it seems only right to get his opinion about why the acid sound is coming back so heavily, both in the US club scene and here in Britain. Josh says that for him it never really went away, it’s always been a part of him and his development as an artist.
“I started to want to make music because of the acid house sounds that came out of Chicago originally, and then I was very heavily affected by how the English took care of it and mutilated it into their own English house sound. People say things happen in cycles. The whole 80s thing came on a twenty-year cycle so by that reckoning the acid house revival would be a little bit early.”
Perhaps a more pertinent question is whether it’s a good thing of a bad thing. Although acid house is the underground kick that the dance music scene needs after years of commercialisation, is looking back for inspiration a positive thing? Are we just bathing in the nostalgia that the tough times bring?
“It comes down to does life imitate art or does art imitate life, or even does art imitate art. We all get inspirations and borrow. What is truly original?
“One of the aspects of why I feel I live life is because I want to be inspired and I want to be inspiring to others. And that’s one of my keys of being here, period, to existing.”
Josh’s brother turned him onto Kraftwerk, he was in a city where hip hop was paramount, then he was introduced to house and then acid house.
“These ideas inspired me to create these ideas in my head into something, even though its been done. It’s my interpretation of these things, and that’s what I think art and literature, music, cooking is. You go to India, you eat food and you’re inspired to cook when you get home. It’s easy to listen to stuff and say, Hey why don’t they do their own stuff, but that’s life.”
Josh likes to go and dance to other DJs to get inspiration, hoping that they play a track that will really turn him on and give him ideas, but when it comes to describing his creative process it’s much more difficult. For the ’20 To 20’ album he was sick and tired of the sameness of things – the stock sounds that people were using in their music, the way that certain songs are the same tempo, the lack of creativity, even the fact that he was only making music on the computer.
“I was listening to some of my old music, and I was like, Wow, this is pretty cool, how do I reproduce that?”
How he did it was by ditching his computer and starting to make tracks with old analogue sequencers and old drum machines, going back to his roots.
“That way I wasn’t reliant on my computer and my standard way of getting something done. When something becomes to easy, or too natural, or too conforming, it becomes a total Pavlovian knee jerk reaction to things.”
Josh Wink isn’t like other producers who lock themselves in a windowless room and then emerge drained of life, looking for groupies and white lines. But he doesn’t consider himself spiritual.
“I’m introspective, I question life, I talk life,” he elucidates. “My parents got divorced when I was younger and my mother got spiritual.”
She lived in an ashram and got into yoga, and Josh became a vegetarian. He says that was when he became conscious of things.
“So I would say I probably more conscious and introspective – full of thought – than I am spiritual. I like to think and talk.”
It might not be what you’d expect of the man who’s just made one of the most brutal acid house albums to date, but the fact that he wanders off to play at The End happily considering the origins of the word ‘skip’ (as in yellow metal rubbish container) that’s exactly what he’s all about. And when he’s not thinking, talking and listening, he’s making savage ear-ripping records. Obvious really.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WINK - PHILADELPHIA
“Philadelphia has always been lost in the shuffle when it comes to dance music, but I really feel it all began there. Because disco started its life in Philadelphia, and house is an augmentation of disco that Detroit and Chicago borrowed from. Philadelphia was also very big for me in terms of hip hop – people like Jazzy Jeff and Cash Money – and now many of my friends are part of the neo-soul movement that’s coming out of Philadelphia too.”
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WINK - AMERICAN CREATIVITY
“The whole Bush collective have been trying to lobby for more money for other things rather than the arts and public broadcasting. It’s a shame. People think that money is more needed for bombs than it is for developing the creativity of a person. Arts programmes for kids, national public radio – which is very important in America – are all needed and I contribute where I can, but not everybody feels the same way.”
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WINK - POLITICS
“I like to be educated about stuff but I don’t consider myself too heavy in the political aspect of things. I try to read up on events but I’m not sure how much of it is truthful. I tend to think people live more of a Buddhist life than we think – that life is an illusion, but we don’t know it. We’re fed certain things what this person said or that person said. But we don’t know if it’s just smoke and mirrors to appease the people and let them have their knowledge. So I don’t know what is true and what isn’t true.”
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WINK - FILE SHARING
“The peer-to-peer networks are great for people who want to get noticed, but the people involved have to step up and let people know that there needs to be a responsibility. People have to be responsible for their actions when they’re on the Internet, not everything is free – cos this is what we’re teaching our kids. These kids won’t know what it’s like to buy a record, and then it’s too late to ask them to buy cos they think it should be free. The simple fact is I’m not making as much of a living as I used to because of file stealing.”