DJ Ron Slomowicz: Let’s talk abut the Fall collection. How did you choose the songs for this compilation?
Josh Wink: Good question. It was very difficult just because of the wonderful catalogue that we have and the wonderful tracks that we had to choose from. I went with feeling and diversity. I wanted to get a lounge-y deep electronic feeling, but I wanted to be able to range between lounge and dance floor. The CD takes you different places, it starts off really deep and musical and then it gets a little bit more dance-y in the middle and then, towards the end, it kind of tapers off. It tells a little bit of a story of the diversity of our library.
DJ Ron: You just mentioned the first compilation, should we expect like a new compilation for every season, like a fall compilation coming out or…?
Josh Wink: We thought it would be neat to tie in a play on words with our first compilation. In the fashion industry, every collection is based on seasons so we thought to tie music into fashion because they go well, so why not try to do the same thing. We don’t want to flood the market with one of our compilations every three or four months, but we definitely want to do more compilations, getting to use our wonderful catalogue again. So we will probably not do a winter one but look to do spring or summer.
DJ Ron: Well what would a spring collection sound like?
Josh Wink: I don’t know. My favorite seasons of the year are fall and the spring. Philadelphia is a city which has all four seasons, so my definition of what spring and fall would be are completely different from someone out in California or somewhere where there aren't all the seasons available. I like the fact of transitions, so spring would be a transitional CD, once again morphing one thing into something else, like a season of completion going into a season of birth. The way the CD tells a story, it starts from one place and it gets to someplace else, that's pretty much really what I want to continue with all of our compilations.
DJ Ron: That sounds cool. Most new labels seem to focus on just one genre, whereas Ovum has a little bit of everything. How do you think that reflects on you as a DJ and a producer?
Josh Wink: I grew up listening to all different kinds of music as a little boy, but as I got older I got into radio. I wanted to be a radio station DJ, that's how my whole involvement in the music industry kind of came about. I had a friend who was a DJ at a radio station who also had a mobile DJ company. I became his apprentice and learned how to DJ for weddings, sweet sixteen parties, bar mitzvahs or whatever. So I was thirteen or fourteen years old and getting exposed to this environment, which more or less at the time was the popular music that's on the radio and the classics that you play at these kinds of events. So mixed in with this, I was also based out of Philadelphia involved with hip-hop music and I got very much into the whole culture of DJing. Then when I first found out about house music from Chicago, that very much influenced where I went, musically speaking.
DJ Ron: That’s a lot of different influences.
Josh Wink: So my diversity being in Philadelphia and then going into being a DJ that’s been exposed to pop music from the 80s, hip-hop music from the 80s and house music from the 80s, I grew up as a DJ as a product of my environment. So when I started DJing at this time, I would play all different kinds of music. At the club, here we played everything from hip-hop to new wave to industrial to house music to high energy to whatever. At that time in the 80s, it was really not necessarily about boundaries and definition, it was just basically about a feeling and having a good time. While now, more or less, it’s gone into definitions and labels. So the diversity in me as a DJ has also gone into my production because I like to delve into different forms of electronic music expressionism, working with drum and bass, ambient, trip-hop, techno and house., It’s also reflected in the label starting out doing more soulful techno and house to King Britt’s style of acid jazz funk to Jamie Myerson’s kind of drum and bass. So that’s why the label has become so eclectic and diverse, just because of the background that I’ve had.
