it myself (it was released on Strictly Rhythm). I signed into a really horrible contract thanks to my attorney. So now when young people ask me for advice, I tell them, ‘Get an attorney who you trust’. It was a nice underground build-up to it, how it came about. “People like Sven would play it at the Love Parade, then at the same time DJ Rap or Gilles Peterson were playing it. It was wild finding out that Gilles wanted to sign it for Talkin’ Loud. It was a unique situation. That year opened up a lot of doors. That same year I released ‘I’m Ready’ as Size Nine and ‘Don’t Laugh’. But it closed some as well. I didn’t want it all so quickly.
“Then later ‘Higher State’ came out again with remixes I had nothing to do with, videos were done without my approval. It was damaging for me. People would come out and expect me to play the new remixes I had nothing to do with. I never got into it to be big and famous, only because music was all I knew and all I wanted to be surrounded by. Everything else that came was a big by-product mistake.”
So was it a bad experience? “I’d call it ‘an’ experience! I cut my hair a couple of years later, stopped doing press. I didn’t become a recluse, but I definitely wanted my anonymity back. It was a weird situation. If I made another record like ‘Higher State’, people would just be ‘Ah, Josh Wink only sounds like that’. Then if I didn’t, people would say, ‘Well, it’s not as good as ‘Higher State’. I wasn’t one to think about creating hits.‘Higher State’ isn’t the epitome of a pop record. When I sent them the demo, they said ‘Would you mind doing it again, because the highs are too loud?’ And I said, ‘No, it sounds how it sounds’. I’d hear stories of people blowing soundsystems or being banned from playing it. It’s kind of cool, a kind of
punk rock thing. These were important experiences that I learned from and took in other directions. Releasing more of what I knew myself to be. That way I can feel good about myself when I wake up in the morning, rather than feeling I’d lost my integrity. That I’m still releasing music now that has relevance in the scene is a pretty big thing for me!”
Well, let’s talk about ‘Balls’, then... as it were. It’s an unashamedly big track... “It’s funny, I’m just realizing that now. It wasn’t my favorite thing that I’d done, but I played it for Matt, my label manager at Ovum, and he said it gave him, like, ‘Underworld chills’. I was playing it out, then I’d take it back to the studio and fine- tune it, and gave it to some friends, like Tiga, Erol Alkan, Carl Cox, Richie Hawtin, all different kinds of people. And I got great feedback. It’s kind of crazy what it’s turning into. It’s still kind of weird to me, as I’ve lived with it for so long.
“The original version was a little bit more tame. It still had the intensity and tension, like when you think you’re going to sneeze but you don’t. A lot of the big songs I’ve done, like ‘How Is Your Evening So Far?’, ‘Superfreak’, ‘Higher State’, ‘I’m Ready’, a lot of them are about waiting for something to change, and it doesn’t, and then having that tension. The version that’s released, that’s the version that someone said ‘You’ve got to have balls to play it’. So that’s how it became known as ‘Balls’. I made this build-up kind of uncomfortably long, and it just seems to work. It’s neat how it’s come about, and what it’s doing to people!”
You now have a solid mix of established acts and new talent on the label. That must be a good feeling... “It does [feel good]. For example, we took a chance
and went with this guy named M A N I K, and now he’s become a big artist. He released his first album with us. We’ve released a few artists now, where their biggest record of that moment was on Ovum. Like Loco Dice, and like Steve Bug. He’d been releasing for a long time, and then ‘Houze’ and ‘Summer Nights’ were some of his biggest. People have used us as a good stepping stone to go on and become something different. It’s really cool that we’re being asked to release music from contemporary artists. And then it’s a nice feeling when Loco Dice says he’d only release outside Desolat with either me or Richie Hawtin. And then Tom Middleton releasing a great, credible track on Ovum after all these years of knowing each other and being fans of Global Communication. And we have a great arsenal of stuff coming out. I hope that continues.”
•The ‘Balls EP’ is out now on Ovum.
djmag.com 033
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