Truancy Volume 189: Peggy Gou

Looking back on the last couple years, you’d be hard-pressed in finding a producer and DJ that’s enjoyed a meteoric rise more than Peggy Gou. Peggy has mentioned that she was sitting on around, give or take, two hundred tracks worth of music before she released her debut EP Art Of War last year. The quick-fire succession of releases that followed in that same very year meant her decision to focus on music and lend her hand at production had worked out, if not better than she’d expected. Peggy grew up learning the piano and composing music from a young age, and ventured off a path in music when she moved to London to study fashion and English at the London College of Fashion. Whilst in the city she met Esa of Huntleys & Palmers’ sister label Highlife. Esa taught her the ropes of Ableton and ultimately paved a new direction predominately focused on music. Peggy packed up her bags shortly after and moved to Berlin, where she still currently resides despite a now-ridiculous tour schedule.

Berlin was a whole new experience for Peggy, finding herself working in a record store which allowed her to expand her musical horizons and indulge in different genres, while helping diversify her sets and work on her productions to a greater degree. She found two mentors early on in her stay in the form of Italian duo Nu Guinea who gave her a training course on analogue gear. Things started snowballing after her debut release came out in January, and a Part 2 on Rekids solidified her as one the most exciting newcomers on the scene. To cap 2016 off, Ninja Tune’s house and techno imprint Technicolour signed her up for another 12″ in the form of Seek For Maktoop.

Wanting to do things a little differently, Peggy offered to take on our 189th Truancy Volume exploring her more downtempo and chill-out picks. Coming in at just under an hour Peggy works her way through tracks by Erykah Badu, hip-hop classics by Black Star, dub from Rhythm and Sound and low BPM groovers from the likes of Wolf Müller and Larry Heard: “I started making this mix a year ago and have been adding tracks and making changes to it since. Sometimes I really enjoy making mixes with tracks that I usually don’t play in club but with the nice home listening stuff I like to listen to when I need break from dance music. It features a lot of my favourite artists, legends like Patrick Cowley, Haroumi Hosono, Larry Heard, Mos Def and Erykah Badu, who are all big inspirations of mine. The way it has been put together means the tracks are sequenced in a way that is slightly different than how I would put them in a DJ set, and shows a little bit more of my personal music taste than the club-style mixes people have heard from me before. I hope you enjoy it!”