To make house music is to walk a fine line between the template and the tangent—between all the things that make house music recognizable as such (the beat, the groove, the repetition) and the things that make a given track stand out across a long, foggy night beneath the disco ball. Peggy Gou has only been putting out music for a couple of years, but the South Korea-born, Berlin-based producer has already proven herself an expert navigator of that balancing act. The best Gou tracks take house music’s familiar form and splash it with color until it’s as splotchy as a tie-dyed piece of fabric. Take “Day Without Yesterday,” from a 2016 12” for London’s Phonica White label. The sound is familiar, with a rippling groove and lush chords that evoke canonical producers like Pépé Bradock and Maurice Fulton. But the sprightly walking bassline and trembling synth chords give the song ample character, ensuring that when you hear it on a dancefloor, mixed in with dozens of songs cut from similar cloth, you’re going to take notice. Likewise, in “Rose,” while her shouted invocations (“Like me! Like you! Like all of us!”) would normally take the spotlight in a club track, they pale alongside the many layers of bright synths and contrasting textures. It’s a clever bit of sleight-of-hand.
Once is Gou’s first new release in nearly a year and a half, and its three tracks mark a significant step forward. For one thing, this is the first time she’s sung on a record: On “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane),” the standout, she oscillates between murmuring and actual singing, and she sounds great. The spoken-word bits lie low in the mix, which has the effect of pulling the listener down to their level. (That she’s singing in Korean only adds an element of intrigue for anyone who doesn’t speak the language.) On the chorus, she adopts a lilting cadence that’s reminiscent of Brazilian popular music; her voice isn’t powerful, but she uses it well, and her sparingly multi-tracked harmonies add dusty color to a track that’s already bursting with vibraphones, jazz-inflected keyboards, and a squelchy hint of acid.
“Hundres Times” loses the vocals and digs into a clubbier, heads-down groove. The drums push forward with the intensity of a 1990s Prescription Records classic, while the track’s tonal center is a loose weave of elastic synth sounds and flickering accents. The arrangement is a model for how to keep things dynamic, teasing individual elements in and out of the mix. Gou’s longstanding fondness for Detroit is evident in the tune’s big, dramatic synth sweeps, and on the closing “Han Jan,” she flips her Motor City instincts into a springy electro jam. Electro is enjoying one of its periodic comebacks right now, with syncopated 808s adding rhythmic spice to many dancefloors more accustomed to house music’s four-on-the-floor thump. But “Han Jan” skips the sci-fi affect of so much contemporary electro and instead reconnects with the genre’s funk roots.
Here, the focus is primarily on the snapping drums and a rubbery bassline that recalls Metro Area’s brand of 1980s revivalism; the synths add a bit of watery background color, and Gou’s rapping feels almost textural. But once she gets to the chorus, the melody, muted as it is, snaps into focus. The hook (“You gotta do it right/Enjoy your life/You gotta do it right”) isn’t much more than dancefloor boilerplate. But it captures your attention, and it sticks with you. Clubs are swimming in indistinguishable tracks—that’s just part of club music. But Gou’s are anything but anonymous.
