Peggy Gou’s I Hear You: not under, not over…. just… ground?

Plus MJ Cole, John Tejada, Plaid and more

Primavera Sound, late night / early morning

As one of the first electronic music genres to emerge, house music has wandered far from its Chicago roots. There are, of course, still many people in Chicago making, DJing and dancing to house music, including many of the original pioneers of the genre, but house, more so than any other type of electronic music, has gone truly global. When was the last time you went anywhere and there wasn’t some sort of house music scene? That’s not something you can say about jungle, UK Garage and footwork, to pick just three examples. 

And house, as an extremely malleable type of music capable of mixing with almost any other genre, has adapted. You have jazz house, tech house, deep house, French house, ambient house and so on. South Africa alone has provided us with kwaito, Bacardi house, amapiano, 3-step etcetera. (I am very far from an expert in South African house, so do excuse any inaccuracies in that.)

All of which has made it hard to define what, exactly, is house music - as opposed to deep house, tribal house, electro house and so on, particularly when it comes to commercial criteria. What, exactly, do Masters at Work make? Is it deep house? Not really. But, at the same time, their work is far from the kind of commercial, main-stage house that the likes of David Guetta and Afrojack spin. How about Daft Punk? They made house music, too, of the kind that sold millions. But you wouldn’t really call it commercial, necessarily.

Peggy Gou, whose debut album I Hear You is out this week, falls in the same category. A lot of people in the dance music world don’t really like Peggy. When Daniel Wang posted on Facebook about his joy at Gou moving out on their shared apartment building in Berlin, the post received thousands of likes; and she has been accused of being an “industry plant” - yawn - more times than I care to mention.

Some criticism may be valid. Gou played the MDL Beast festival in Saudi Arabia, a country where there are huge problems with human rights; and her response to being asked about it in i-D was weak: “It doesn’t matter if it's Israel or North Korea … If there's people who want to hear my music, I will go. I don't give a fuck.”

But Gou was hardly alone in electronic music in taking the Saudi Arabian petrodollar. And while that doesn’t excuse it, I want to talk about her music, as Gou’s debut album hits the stores.

Because Gou - alongside Fred Again, Overmono, Bicep and perhaps Four Tet - seems to exemplify a trend for dance music that is neither underground, nor overground. It’s just…. ground. Similarly, Gou’s music isn’t deep house, jazz house, tech house, electro house, it’s just… house.

Take a look at her DJ sets. Gou’s DJ-Kicks Mix, from 2019, includes tracks by the likes of Kode9, Pearson Sound, Aphex Twin and Catalan jazz fusion band Pegasus; more recently, her Apple Music New Years Eve 2024 mix has tunes from the likes of Doug Lazy, Floorplan, Sally C and Nyra. Her Gudu label, meanwhile, has released records from house weirdo Maurice Fulton. IDM electro-ist DMX Krew, Special Request, Lady Blacktronica and more, an intriguing selection of producers and a line up that you would struggle to second guess. 

What unites all of this is strong hooks and sharp production, two qualities that are fundamental to Gou’s own music. I Hear You is bursting with hooks, crammed full of choruses and strained to the seams with ear-worm melodies. That is, depending on where you sit, either its charm or its downfall.

Take (It Goes Like) Nanana, Gou’s global hit and inescapable summer 2023 anthem. Literally every single part of the song is hook: the drums are swung with dance-along aplomb; the bass line a simple wander that will follow you home; the plastic-y synth line - as inspired ATB’s 9PM (Till I Come) - is pure holiday memory bait; the pianos a three-chord romp that just won’t go away; and the chorus so dumbly addictive it verges on genius. (“Dumb” is no bad thing here: lots of good things in music are dumb.) Like it or loathe it, you have to admit that it takes a special kind of skill to make something this catchy that doesn’t sound entirely cheap or necessarily forced.

It’s the same for I Go, Gou’s lethally addictive 2021 single, which also features on the album. Its chorus is both underplayed and capable of reducing a dance-floor to cinders, while the production is a pleasing tribute to the 90s house sound that is unashamedly afraid to be soft and melodic, like a big Todd Terry production from his mid 90s commercial peak.

There are a few songs like this on I Hear You, an album that doesn’t try to hide its love for the 90s. “90s music really helped me through that hard time,” Gou says in the accompanying album bumph. “It has repetitive patterns but they’re not boring. The lyrics always convey a simple, yet strong message. If you hear it once, you’ll never forget it.”

Back To One has a brilliantly slinky shuffle to its drums, which it combines with MK-ish synth riffs and a soaring synth string arrangement, while Lobster Telephone sounds like a 90s Pet Shop Boys production with added snare rush and lyrics in Korean. I Believe In Love Again, with Lenny Kravitz, goes so far as to borrow the none-more-90s-house of the Korg M1, although the vocal is frankly horrible, tipping the song way over the edge where chant becomes cheese.

The 90s sounds also re-occurs, in a slightly stranger fashion, on All That, an early 90s Madonna-style piece of breakbeat pop house, with a guest vocal from Puerto Rican rapper Villano Antillano; and, more successfully, on Purple Horizon, which combines a bleep-y sub bass with pop breakbeat, 303 burble, Jam & Lewis style synth slabs and an MK / Todd Edwards-style cut-up vocal, in what is probably the closest Gou will ever get to early 90s free-party crust.

The album’s most adventurous song, however, is Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구), a cross between pop drum & bass and the sound of the gayageum, a traditional Korean instrument a little like a zither. I’m not saying no one has ever made a song like this before. But I haven’t heard one, if they have, and the cross over works surprisingly well. Kudos, too, to Peggy for putting something generally different on her album.

Not all of I Hear You works so well. 1+1=11 sounds vapid in its adoption of 90s trance sounds, Gou’s ear for a hook taking temporary leave in the song’s rudimentary chord sequences, serving as a warning as to how thin the line can be between hook-laden and hollow. I Believe In Love Again should have been strangled at birth; and Your Art isn’t as profound as Gou probably thought it was.

But, at its best, I Hear You is adventurous when it needs to be and hooky when it doesn’t; well-produced, danceable and fun: it’s house music, in other words, neither deep nor tech nor boring and we should be tickled by its charms.

Some listening

Bklava - All Around Me (feat. MJ Cole)

MK Cole at his best manages to fuse the very musical with the slightly strange - think those haunting backwards vocal effects on Sincere, for example. All Around Me, with South London artist Bklava, does just that, combining an almost classical piano run, with some weird swirling effects that bug around like birds in a mirage. Under it, naturally, is a perfectly executed 4/4 garage beat, while Bklava’s vocal sounds absolutely made for summer nights.

John Tejada and Plaid - Bittersweet

Bittersweet indeed: this intriguing hook up between three veterans of emotional electronic music has a suitably poignant chord sequence that never quite goes where you expect it to, loafing round in weirdly extending circles over a tough house beat and a touch of acid. I generally don’t like those orchestral electronic music shows but I would make an exception if some symphony orchestra decided to get its hands on Bittersweet.

Emma Anderson - For a Moment (Deary dub mix)

Call me an old nostalgia-filled pustule but I miss those beautiful times in the early 90s when shoegazing met electronica in a brief, thwarted love affair that burned brief and burned bright. One of my favourites songs back then was the Spooky remix of Lush’s Undertow and - for pretty obvious reasons - the Deary dub remix of Emma Anderson’s For a Moment send me right back there, when beats were hazy, bass lines dub influenced and vocals were required by law to be known as gossamer. For a Moment is cotton-candy lovely.

Mercury Rev - Patterns

Has any band ever done wonderment as well as Mercury Rev? I don’t think so. From their punky, chaotic origins to their later classic rock-style incarnations there was always something in them that sounded like they were staring into a nebula at the end of the universe, contemplating how beautiful their imminent death would be. Patterns, the first single from their new album Born Horses (great title BTW), is very much of this ilk, as Jonathan Donahue’s mystical spoken word vocal slowly spools out over orchestral backing. 

Things I’ve done

Line Noise Episode 167 (Hyperdub special with Kode9, Ikonika, DJ Haram and Heavee)

I did 21 interviews over four days at Primavera Sound last week and everyone was utterly charming. Some are available on the Radio Primavera Sound Mixcloud - and some are becoming Line Noises, which will be coming out over the coming weeks. What better, though, to start than a Hyperdub special with Kode9, Ikonika, DJ Haram and Heavee. That is a dream line up. I could have spoken to each of them for an hour. As it was, I had the four for 30 minutes.

How Beastie Boys’ ‘Ill Communication’ set a benchmark for '90s eclecticism

If you were alive in 1994 and didn’t like the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication, there is very little I can do for you, I am afraid. It was an album that marked me, at the tender age of 16, and I was very glad to write about it for DJ Magazine, not the least because I got to talk to Hurricane! “‘Ill Communication’ wasn’t the biggest Beastie Boys album; that medal goes to the multi-million selling ‘Licensed to Ill’. Nor was it the New York trio’s coolest or most radical-sounding when placed next to the sampladelic collages of ‘Paul’s Boutique’, or the underground sensation that was ‘Check Your Head’. It was, however, in many ways, more important than all that. Released on 31st May 1994, Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz, Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond and the late Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch’s fourth album marked the moment when  everything finally clicked into place for them.”

The playlists

Festival season is upon us and surely you don’t want to be left behind in your musical tastes? Well, I have the solution. I have two playlists of the best new music, this one, which is long and dates back years, and this one, which is just 2024. All your worries disappear.