Electronic music trailblazer Josh Wink unveils his new Selects Playlist on Apple Music, offering fans a personal window into the music that influenced his formative years as a DJ and producer. This wide-ranging, 67-track collection spans genres, decades, and continents, charting the sounds that inspired Wink long before his own productions reshaped global dance culture.
“These are some of the songs that soundtracked my life during my early teenage years and early 20s,” Wink shares. “They not only served as tools for me to DJ with but also nurtured and inspired my desires to make electronic music as an artist in the 90s.”
The playlist captures a remarkable breadth of sound, from pioneering electronic innovators to post-punk visionaries, industrial experimentalists, hip-hop trailblazers, and foundational house and techno artists. Highlights include Kraftwerk’s “Home Computer,” 808 State’s “Pacific State,” Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygène Pt. 4,” and Chicago house essentials like Phuture’s “Acid Tracks,” Adonis’ “No Way Back,” Sleezy D’s “I’ve Lost Control,” and Steve Poindexter’s “Computer Madness.”
Wink also spotlights artists who blurred genre boundaries ahead of their time, including Herbie Hancock (“Rockit”), Afrika Bambaataa (“Planet Rock”), Scritti Politti, A Tribe Called Quest, Paul McCartney (“Temporary Secretary”), and Grace Jones (“Slave to the Rhythm”). These tracks reflect Wink’s early openness to sounds that were futuristic, funky, confrontational, emotional, or simply unprecedented.
Soul, jazz fusion, and Philadelphia roots thread through the playlist, with selections from Teddy Pendergrass and MFSB, highlighting the musical DNA of Wink’s hometown. Ambient and cinematic tracks like Steve Roach’s “Structures from Silence,” Tangerine Dream’s “Love on a Real Train,” and Peter Gabriel’s “Of These, Hope” provide glimpses into the meditative textures that later shaped his own atmospheric productions.
Together, the Selects Playlist paints a vivid portrait of the influences that shaped Wink’s evolution from a young Philadelphia DJ to one of electronic music’s most innovative and enduring figures. As he marks the 30-year legacy of his transformative releases—including “Higher State of Consciousness,” “Don’t Laugh,” and “I’m Ready”—the playlist offers an intimate look at the music that quietly fueled his imagination, ambition, and artistic voice.
Josh Wink’s Selects Playlist is available now on Apple Music, providing a masterclass in curiosity, musical exploration, and the foundations of innovation in electronic music.