French DJ Piu Piu and Her Girls Girls Girls Crew Are The Coolest

This article was originally published in THUMP UK

Giulietta Canzani sits in her boyfriend's Paris flat, intermittently puffing at a cigarette, reeling off her itinerary for the next couple of weeks: a flight to Edinburgh for a gig, then an afterparty in the South of France for luxury label Kenzo, then back again to London for a stint at Benji B's Deviation night. It's all go go go for Canzani at the moment, but she's appreciative of how everything is scoping out. "I'm really happy about it!" she tells me over Skype. "I'm really happy how things turned out to be really cool."

Canzani, who goes by the nickname Piu Piu (mimicking the sound birds apparently make in French), is one upbeat individual. Her enthusiasm is infectious—a lot of our conversation could easily be transcribed with exclamation marks. After years of working in fashion editorial, she decided to go full time with a musical career in 2010. "I was depressed and feeling like it was not as creative as I thought it would be," she says of her days in the fashion industry. "I was working a lot but it wasn't me. I was being dishonest with myself."

After quitting her job and relocating to Sweden in an effort to recharge her batteries, she began writing music with her visiting brother, the Clek Clek Boom founder French Fries. "I always wrote songs but I never thought I could do it as a living," she admitted. "I just thought 'you know what? I'm just going to try it and we'll see what's going to happen.'" The next year, she hooked up with the Parisian creative collective Girls Girls Girls, becoming one of their integral members in the process, a relationship that follows through to this year.

In 2013, Canzani released her debut mixtape to her Bandcamp. Entitled Nightintale, it pulled together a murderer's row of bubbling talent from the beat/hip-hop underground like rising star Ryan Hemsworth and the Miami avant-raunchmeisters Metro Zu. Floating above all the clattering percussion and Waka Flocka samples is Canzani's voice, a calm and thoughtful presence amidst sonic chaos.

It's a fine album, bustling with promise, but before we can expect a follow-up, Canzani needs to be able to stick around in the one place. Before she headed off to rock some parties with her DJ sets, I caught up with her to talk about learning to DJ for a living, repping for Rinse FM in France, her new material and making pro-masturbation sound art.

THUMP: Hi there. When are you flying out to Edinburgh for your show with Vitamins?

Friday!

Wow, so you're just heading straight there.

Yeah and I'm coming back on Saturday so it's really like, half-a-day or something.

And then Deviation next week.

Yeah, exactly.

It's all happening!

Yeah, it's cool.

I was just looking at the Girls Girls Girls Tumblr, and they have a history section that lists three members that formed in September 2011. You weren't one of those original members, were you?

No, it was Louise [aka 2 Chenz/ChChChen], Betty and other friends of ours who got drunk at a dinner party and decided to make their own parties. At that time, I didn't even know Louise. I actually met her because she asked me to come play at their first party, so I met her at Social Club for the first time ever. We partied and after a while, I had my own night and we decided to join forces. I'm so happy to be with girls, because I had been touring with my brother [French Fries] and Bambonou and stuff—which was really fun, but I'm really happy to be with girls, it's a different vibe.

Girls Girls Girls burst up in reaction to a male-dominated club scene in Paris. A couple of years in, does it feel like there's a shift away from that?

It's kind of hard to say. Maybe it's less of a question of being a girl or a boy, and now it's less important. I don't know, mentalities don't change like that. Except for really big hip-hop nights where there were only guys, I have never felt underestimated because I was a girl—it was more like a personal challenge to become better and better. But not in electro music, that was different, I have never felt like that.

So after you returned to Paris from Sweden, when did you start doing club nights?

Way after that, seven or eight months after. I was like, if I want to make a living out of this, I need to do something music-related that I can live off. So I thought, I'm gonna start DJing. In Paris at that time, most girls that were DJing were not real DJs, they were selectors. I wanted to be a real DJ. So I practiced in my room for a while and when I felt I was good enough to play. I was really scared of playing in front of people at the beginning! I'm still stressed but before, it was really really stressful. But the first time I played, I realised how much fun it was. You know, some of the things in your life that you don't expect to do and when you do it, you're like 'man! Why didn't I think of that before?!'

It gave you the opportunity to do Rinse France as well. How did the guys and gals at Rinse approach you?

Well, that's really my friends that are taking care of Rinse. I've known Manaré [from Clek Clek Boom collective] since he was twelve or something, so when he started the station he really wanted me to have a show.

[daily_motion src='//www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x1gg0no' width='620' height='270']

Piu Piu - Rinse France DJ Set

by rinsefrance

Was it ever considered as solely a solo show or a show that brought in the whole Girls Girls Girls clique?

At the beginning [Manaré] wanted me to do the morning show. I said to him, Maybe we should do it with Girls Girls Girls, because it'd be more fun for a morning show to have the whole crew doing it, but he really wanted me to have my own show. I really wanted to have one too. I'm the one that's been DJing the most out of the three of us so it made much more sense… But I think that Louise is going to have one now. Betty—she's a really great guest on Sound Pelligrino's show.

The music on Nightintale is very beat-heavy, but there's a calming effect to how you perform on the album, like these are torch songs. How intentional was it to have these two vibes constantly clashing against one another?

Well, at that exact moment I was trying to do something and I wasn't really sure of what I was going to make at the end. When I was working [in fashion], I felt like I was being dishonest with myself and I really wanted the music to be the opposite. I was just focused on one song and then another song, but my aim was to make something really sincere.

Now when I listen to it, it's like a whole part of me that isn't here anymore. I think the new stuff's going to be more powerful and less… self-centered. Like, inspire yourself and other people to do feel better and find your own centre—that wasn't something I was able to do at that time in my life. Now, I feel like that's something I really want to do and I hope the new music is something that can make people feel better.

You dropped "