Some records age. Higher State of Consciousness never did. Josh Wink built it in Philadelphia in the mid nineties, New York label Strictly Rhythm released it in 1995, and three decades later it still works as a blunt instrument. Drop it and the room goes up. The reason is the acid line: a Roland TB 303 pushed so far past its intended job that it stops sounding like a bassline and starts sounding like an alarm going off inside the track.
It started as a downtempo album cut
The version everybody knows was not the plan. An early and much slower take on the track first surfaced in 1994 on a Strictly Rhythm compilation called The Deep And Slow, a project built around chillout material rather than rave weaponry. The mix that eventually took over the world only exists because the label needed something to push the compilation.
“The A&R suggested doing a remix of the track to help promote this album,” Wink told Electronic Sound. That remix, credited as the Tweekin’ Acid Funk Mix, is the one that ended up on every festival stage for the next thirty years. Strictly Rhythm issued it properly in March 1995, with the UK release following in October of the same year.
Inside the Higher State of Consciousness studio setup
The gear list is short and famous. Wink worked with a Roland TB 303, a TR 909 and a TR 808, an Akai S950 sampler and a 16 track mixer, with drum hits and stabs triggered from the sampler. The rhythmic backbone comes from a sped up loop of Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It),” the same break that drum and bass producers were mining relentlessly at the time.
The 303 itself has a good origin story. Wink has said he bought his first one in a Philadelphia pawn shop in 1990 for seventy dollars, back when a machine Roland had designed as a bass accompaniment for guitarists was still cheap and unloved. “I love the fact that the unit was for one purpose and became famous, and sought after, for a completely different reason,” he told Roland.
He has also been clear about where his head was. “Both as a DJ and a producer, I was heavily influenced by UK hardcore or jungle and Chicago acid house,” Wink said. The record sits exactly on that line: the swing and the filter sweeps come from acid, the aggression and the breakbeat pressure come from the UK.
The mix that almost got sent back
The crescendo is the part that made the record notorious, and it nearly got rewritten. The plant flagged it: the high frequencies at the peak were too hot. Wink was asked to redo the mix and refused, saying that if it had to be changed he did not want to release it at all.
“I’m glad I stuck with my vision, as the track wouldn’t have had the same impact,” he said later. He was right. That unmanageable top end is precisely what gave the record its reputation for destroying rave soundsystems in the nineties, and it is why the drop still reads as violent on a modern rig that can actually handle it.
From Philadelphia to the UK top ten
What happened next was not something anyone in the studio had modelled. The single reached number 8 on the UK singles chart and number 1 on the UK dance chart in 1995. It went top ten in Ireland, top ten on the Billboard Dance Club Play chart in the United States, and charted across Spain, Norway, Finland and Canada. The 1996 remix package went one place better in Britain, peaking at number 7. The BPI certified it silver.
“I didn’t expect such madness to come out of this release: gold records, national top tens, number ones,” Wink said. The track anchored his 1996 album Left Above the Clouds, and the exposure landed at exactly the right moment for the label he had founded in Philadelphia with King Britt in October 1994, Ovum Recordings, which is still running today.
Its footprint spread fast. The Porn Kings lifted it for their 1996 single “Up to No Good,” and the remix roll call since then reads like a survey of three different eras of dance music: Dex & Jonesey in 1996, Dirty South & TV Rock and Marco V in 2007, an Erol Alkan edit, and more recent reworks from Adana Twins, Max Cooper and Damian Lazarus.
Why Higher State of Consciousness still lands
The accolades kept arriving long after the chart run. NME placed it ninth in its singles of the year list in December 1995. Mixmag included it in a 2020 rundown of the biggest drops in dance music. Rolling Stone ranked it number 128 on its 2022 list of the 200 greatest dance songs of all time.
Wink himself has a more complicated relationship with it. He has joked that the song is his biggest regret, and has admitted that interviews get tedious when every single one opens with the same question. That is the cost of writing something this recognisable. Thirty years on, an audience that was not born when it came out still reacts to the first four bars, which is a harder test than any chart position.
Plenty of nineties records survive on nostalgia alone. This one survives because it still does damage, in the same way a New York house record like Flawless or a sample flip like Call on Me found a second life on stages their makers never imagined. For a fuller release history, the track’s discography record runs through every mix and chart placing.
