Perhaps you don't know it, but the last year and a half have been busy for Philidelphia's Josh Wink. After conquering the world in 1995 with his three massive singles "I Am Ready," "Don't Laugh" and "Higher States Of Conciousness" Josh didn't just crawl under a rock and count his money. Instead, he invested it into his and King Britt's Ovum label which struck a deal with Ruffhouse/Columbia for worldwide distribution of Ovum's releases. Harvesting raw talent like New Jersey's Jamie Meyerson or King Britt's Sylk 130 project and all the singers and songwriters who have appeared on King's recently released When The Funk Hits The Fan or Wink's forthcoming long-player HearHere, Ovum is well on its way to putting King and Wink's hometown of Phillidelphia back on the music map for good. After scoring an exclusive interview with Wink back in July of 1996, we couldn't resist checking in with him on the eve of HearHere's release. Here's some of what went down:
DMA: So the last time we spoke, you were setting up the label and you were only DJing one gig a month and you were about to release your debut album Left Above The Clouds. What have you been doing since?
WINK: Well, first, the label has taken a lot of time to develop. Solidifying the communication between the parties involved -- Ruffhouse, Columbia and Sony Worldwide -- It's been an interesting journey in getting all that taken care of and basically a lot of the time in that hiatus has been set on finishing up King's album finishing up Jamie's album and releasing a couple of singles along the way.
DMA: Being a journalist, I get promotional cassettes and CD's on your artists pretty consistently and I've had the Sylk 130 album since last June and the Jamie Meyerson since last July. These albums are just getting released now. What has been the hold up?
WINK: Some things changed on them. We wanted to make sure that everybody understood everything before we released it. We also realised now that things take a lot longer when dealing with such a big company such as Sony. When we were independant, when we wanted to do a release, we just did the release in a month. Now with Sony, we have to get paperwork in and it has to be approved by this person and that person and then we have to get artwork and there's lots of different things we have to deal with along the way that we're learning about. Their albums were done and basically we wanted to get them out and get the hype around them. Personally, I think that Jamie's album should have been out a lot sooner -- we were going to release it in October and then something happened and we didn't feel it was right to release it during the Christmas rush because stuff really doesn't sell that well except for the hits and Christmas music. And then we were going to release it in January but we wanted to do a couple of single follow-up's before we released the album. We put out "Rescue Me" with the remixes and that's been doing pretty well for us. Now, finally, the album is ready to come out.
DMA: Putting out "Rescue Me" as the first single from Jamie's album did you find that a risk or a safe choice as a single being that it's the only house-based track on the album?
WINK: Actually, we had an Ovum Label sampler out and two of the songs from the sampler are from Jamie's album. We figured that was considered a release in it's own right. We also did a promo-only jungle EP of tracks from the Listen Project so by the time we put out "Rescue Me" we didn't think of it was being the first release from him. But releasing "Rescue Me" was what Jamie wanted and King and I felt that with the right remixes, it was a good idea as well. We're very in tune with Jamie and making sure we see his vision and he sees where we're coming from as well.
