Peggy Gou and Four Tet was the set I was most looking forward to this weekend and it did not disappoint. Gou’s direct, buoyant house and Kieran Hebden’s appetite for surreal musical detours made for a unique and compatible musical harmony.

Gou’s debut album, I Hear You, drew on the sound of 1990s club music, and her crossover success has never erased the simplicity of a well-placed house hook. Four Tet comes from a more wandering production history, but his legendary DJ sets have long made room for blunt impact alongside the cerebral delicacy people associate with his records. The question was where those instincts would meet once both artists had the same enormous dance floor in front of them.

There was plenty of substance in the shared selection. KMA Productions’ “Cape Fear” brought the charge of UK garage into the mix, while CASSIMM’s “Love Desire” and Eddy M’s “Dropping” pointed toward a straighter house pulse. K-LONE’s “Holdup” added another connection to contemporary UK club music. Even a handful of identified records suggests why reducing the pairing to commercial versus experimental misses some of the fun: both DJs work with music designed to move people, and both have more than one way of getting there.

The result was most persuasive when heard as a club set given a huge outdoor platform. A back-to-back has a different kind of suspense from a solo performance. Each record changes the options for the next person, and a recognizable groove can become the meeting point for two otherwise different approaches. There was a looseness to that proposition on a weekend where the later headliners would bring very established expectations with them.

This was also another one of Saturday’s major performances that survived the weather intact. The schedule had moved earlier, placing Gou and Hebden before Under Construction, whose set was ultimately interrupted by lightning. The storm would dominate the story of the night, but it should not swallow everything that came before it. Gou and Four Tet got their time together, and their pairing gave Head Trip a distinct musical question to consider before the weekend’s more immediate pleasures took over. The answer did not have to be perfectly tidy to be worth dancing through.

Article & Photos by: Andrew Ameter

Peggy Gou Tears It Up at Indio's Head Trip Festival