Wuh Oh is very good fun. If you’ve seen the Glasgow-born producer’s wild new video for “How Do You Do It?”, you’ll already be well aware of that. You see, the trippy greenscreen party is sort of like what would happen if The Chemical Brothers had a baby with Jamiroquai and it swiftly became a big fan of Busta Rhymes. And what’s not to love about that?
While he’s recently scored fans in the form of Hudson Mohawke and Pete Tong, Wuh Oh — who cites Björk, Jai Paul and Daft Punk as major inspirations — has been taking music making seriously since the age of 10. In fact, he tells us, “anything else I did outside of music over the years was more of a distraction attempt, to keep the family from worrying about my true ambition of trying to make music for a living. It turns out they’re happy either way!”
It also turns out that Wuh Oh (Peter, to friends, family and anyone else uncomfortable addressing somebody by their artist name) is one of those annoying people managing to be really productive during lockdown. To the extent that he just one upped Charli XCX and created an entire album’s worth of music in just seven days and seven nights. “It was exhausting!” he says. “I managed to blurt out ten tunes from scratch last Monday to Sunday — some happy hardcore, some ambient stuff, some obscene avant-garde jazz, some blaring acid techno…”
Phew. “As you can probably imagine, it sounds like a madman’s mind unravelling. On day seven I felt ready to quit music and burn the whole album, but after I was able to take a step back for a few days, I realised there are some keepers in there! You’ll hear some of them soon enough.”
In the meantime, Peter has blessed us with this very exciting mix packed full of previously unheard music not just from himself but Sega Bodega (including his remix of Wuh Oh’s “How Do You Do It?”), Edinburgh producer Jaisu, frequent collaborators Edwin Organ and Arm Watches Fingers as well as Wuh Oh’s well-named alter-ego DJ Wabbo.
“It’s special to me in that it features only unreleased tracks from me and my friends,” he says. “It felt nice weaving together tracks by a few old buddies, as we’ve all sort of grown up together as producers. The mix was also a great excuse to finally finish some of the sketches I’ve had in the vaults for years. You may not hear any of this stuff anywhere else ever again, which I really like about it. Right now feels like a great time for people to discover new music that’s a little off the beaten path.”