Fertile future
Wink on how to make your label last 20 years like Ovum...
“Release music you’re comfortable releasing, that you feel 100% integrity with. Because that will follow you around for the rest of your life. It’s kind of like getting a tattoo. You wouldn’t want to get a tattoo that you’ll regret later on in life. The difference is that you can have a tattoo removed. We always signed music we were comfortable with, not the ones we thought would make us lots of money. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in the long run we’re happy because you can play stuff from our catalogue from the ‘90s, and it still sounds relevant today. Labels and trends come and go, like artists, like journalists, like chefs, it’s just life. So sign music you believe in. Listen with your heart, don’t think with your head. “Think about the sound. At the beginning for us, we’d think, ‘Does this have an Ovum sound?’, and what exactly that means. We started out with drum & bass and techno, and King’s more soulful, acid jazz style, and then continued to sign diverse music. We wanted people to listen to an Ovum release whether you were a deep house person, or a jacking house person or a techno person. You tend to listen to an Ovum release because you’re not really sure what it is. “Make sure it’s something that you will love doing. We didn’t get into this to make a really good living, but because it’s a passion of ours. Ovum doesn’t make a lot of money. Back in the day it was self-sustaining, but now it’s hard to keep a label afloat. We’re happy to be in a position that unknown producers still want to be associated with Ovum, and my colleagues who I look up to, whose music that I play, want to be involved. It’s a blessed position.”
show in America on Sirius XM. The programming is people like Armin van Buuren, Paul Oakenfold, Steve Aoki, Paul van Dyk, so I’m kind of the odd one out. Before my show is often Sander van Doorn, so if someone’s in the car listening to that show, and then I come on and mention four or five people I’ll be playing on Profound Sounds, like Jeff Mills, or Claude Young or Amon Tobin... there’s the Buddhist saying about a journey of 1000 miles beginning with one step, so if I can get one person who by mistake listens to my show to be inspired to go and dig deeper, then you have one more person who knows a little more than what’s available to them through mainstream music.
“Everything has its purpose. It’s good to think that people have been at least converted or exposed to this kind of music. A new generation now know what this kind of music is, rather than only knowing what is played on mainstream radio.”
Let’s go back to when you were first exposed to music... “Well, I started out when I was 13-years-old, as a mobile DJ. I have this history of being able to play from 9pm to four in the morning, and at weddings, where the main thing is to entertain. As a DJ, there’s a responsibility to balance entertainment
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and education. There’s people who only want to do one or other of those. I went to summer camp and the guy who was the local radio DJ for the area was one of the counsellors. He played a dumb trick on me, and I was rushed to hospital with an asthma attack. He came with me, he felt so bad, and we became friends. He also had a mobile DJ company. So he’d give me $50 and I’d go and get the top 40 on vinyl, and I’d learn the whole set-up. I was his apprentice at 13. And it moved forward, I bought his equipment, learned to beat-match, and was going to the block parties in Philadelphia where people like Jazzy Jeff and Cash Money, the local Philly DJs would play. I was also immersed in the punk rock scene, the reggae scene, and the hip-hop scene.”
That must have been insanely cool, going to Jazzy Jeff’s block parties. What were they like? “They were outside street parties, or in the parks and recreation centres. For me, it was just part of growing up. Also an important part of that was Lady B, a DJ on the local Philly station. A lot of the hip-hop crowd weren’t desired in the nightclubs, so you’d hear about the block parties because of her.” You founded Ovum with King Britt around this time, right? “It was the diverse appreciation of music which
brought me together with King. I was a bike messenger, and one of the other guys, who’d become one of my best friends, was called Blake. We were both DJs, and in the mid-’80s in Philly, it wasn’t really a popular thing to be. It was weird and interesting that two couriers were DJs and deep into the 4AD sound, like the Cocteau Twins, and people like Section 25 and Depeche Mode. And New Order. It was like, ‘Wow, a band with a drum machine’. Art of Noise, sampling and hip-hop together. We’d throw our own warehouse parties, and he said, ‘You got to meet my friend King’.
“He was a record buyer at Tower, and then we became brothers because we shared this diverse taste. He had this studio, and I was a DJ, so we started making our first records together. He was the tour DJ with the [‘90s hip-hop act] Digable Planets, and I said ‘When you get back off tour, do you want to be part of a label?’ and he said sure. He was about to have a baby, so we called it Ovum. That was 1994.”
And then ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ came in 1995? “Correct. It was all a bit of a mistake! No one really thought it was going to be like that. If I’d have known it was going to be big, I’d have released
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