Girl To Know: Peggy Gou
photo: @maadmagazine
“Before I was a DJ, I was a raver,” Peggy Gou mentions in an interview with The Guardian. The South Korean DJ lives in Berlin, yet finds herself roaming the globe making thousands of people extremely happy. Her specialty is kinetic sound mixing of genres; minimal trance, electronic, dance and house. With seven EP’s under belt, in the spring of 2019, Gou launched her own indie label Gudu Records (gudu means "shoes” in Korean).
As mentioned in an interview with The Guardian, “Gou sometimes refers to her music as “K-house”. “I believe that a lot of Korean and K-pop artists, they want to be European,” she says. “But there are so many beautiful things in Korea. And that’s also one thing that I always get touched by: both of my big ‘hits’ are not in English. When I see that crowd reaction, it’s like, they don’t even know how to sing these lyrics, and they still love it.”
photo: @peggygou_
In 2009 while she was studying fashion design in London, a friend taught her how to dj. After moving to Berlin, Gou worked at a record store as she started picking up gigs and then released her EP debut in 2016. It didn’t take too long for Gou to elevate into her current cult status. She plays more than a hundred worldwide gigs and music festivals a year. In 2019 Gou was named in the #ForbesUnder30 list, with over a million dedicated instagram followers.
In February 2019, Gou returned to her love of fashion with the launch of KIRIN (“giraffe” in Korean), in support by Virgil Abloh’s New Guards Group. Another monumental event was the summer 2019 release of her first music video for Starry Night exclusively on Apple Music. Directed by Jonas Lindstroem, who has worked on impressive fashion campaigns with Hermes, Adidas, Kenzo and Uniqlo. The video also stars South Korean actor of Burning, Yoo Ah-in.
A new video for her song I Go dropped in August 2021, directed and art directed by Inji Seo.
Gou does not have a professional manager, she is in charge of her career. That is something refreshing and indeed scary considering the globetrotting lifestyle the creative musician and entrepreneur leads. Yet according to Gou’s Instagram stories and video ‘grams, watching her presence on stage and the exuberant energy she gives out to the crowds, you can’t help but want some of that independent spirit to rub off on you.
