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PROFOUND SOUNDS 2
(OVUM)
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The first half of Josh Wink’s new two-CD set will surprise fans. It’s mainstream house music, complete with lush beats, sensual guy vocals, and shouting divas, and far from the sharp-edged, non-lush, acid-based trance music that’s been his signature for more than a decade. Still, Wink has his own take on house music, one that’s less plush or ornate than the genre usually admits. The 17-track set opens with "Form Is Emptiness," by the German trio Swayzak (whose several CDs to date enjoy cult-hit status), and the title says it all about the delicate structures, the open spaces, and the quietly sexy, elusively limpid music that follows. Wink’s segues follow the same rule of quiet. From "Form Is Emptiness" to Timeblind’s "Interrupt" to Rithma’s "Tracks for a Weirder Day," he blends rhythm to rhythm, fronting it so that the dancer doesn’t notice the melodic shifts occurring in the background. Eventually it becomes more frantic, until the set reaches its climax in Rino Cerrone’s "Ritis 6 Loop 2," where the rhythm is as brazenly sexy as anything in Junior Vasquez’s œuvre — up from which a voice as diva as it gets shouts out one of those truths that make house such an anthemic genre. "Lemme tell you somethin’ about house music," she wails. "It’s not just a groove/House! It’s a FEELING . . . and when you feel it, you will understand that house music is FREEDOM!" Indeed. The second CD in the set returns Wink to the harsh, opulent, acid-based extended riffing that has defined his DJ hand since the early 1990s.
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