Goldfish is an electronica and dance group hailing from Cape Town, South Africa, consisting of Dominic Peters and David Poole. They create dance music containing elements of jazz and African music, combining live instruments like double bass, saxophones, keyboards, flute, and vocals with samplers, effects and synths.
We caught up with the South African duo at Ultra Music Festival to talk more about their performance, their recent trip to India and beyond.
How you guys been over here at Ultra?
It’s been really great! We were on really early on a Saturday. I think that’s one of earliest sets we’ve played in a long time and we’re definitely wide awake right now!
How was it like playing over here at Ultra?
It’s always an honor to play at Ultra and the crowd is always full of energy and always ready to rock and roll so it was great! We did our thing! We pulled our live instruments and we jammed away and I think we got everyone going on a great day at Ultra.
What do you think is the advantage of having live music with dance music at Ultra?
We put live instruments into dance music mainly because we started out as live musicians. It was kind of like the obvious thing to do. The exciting thing about it is that it adds energy. We can inject energy into the music at any time and it’s also different because anything can happen. It adds that human feel and the excitement into the music.
Tell us more about you future releases.
Well, we just released our latest album. It’s called ‘3 Second Memory’. We’re currently about to release a new single from that album and it’s called ‘Moonwalk Away’. We’ve also got awesome remixes by great young guys. We’ve also done our own remix edits of this song. So it’s amazing to be able to relook at a song, months later, and do something totally different with it; approach it in a totally different way. We wanted something that we could play live and still have that Goldfish feeling and it’s nice to be able to reinvent the track.
You were in India a couple of months ago. Tell us how was the whole experience there?
In India we played at this amazing festival called Sunburn and it was really incredible. The energy of the people, the stage was awesome! We had a great time. We played an amazing set there, it was one of our best ones ever. The whole experience was amazing and Goa is cool. I don’t think we knew what to expect as well because we’d never been to India before and it was a huge surprise that so many people actually knew our music and showed up for the sets. Travelling all the way there was really worthwhile.
Being there for the first time and after the experience, what’s your outlook on the EDM scene?
I think we have a limited exposure as we’ve only been there once but if Sunburn is anything to go, I think it’s looking good. It seems like India has embraced the dance music and the future is bright.
Going to South Africa, how is the music scene over there?
The music scene in South Africa is the same as India. Dance music is exploding. Dance music has always been strong there. There has been lot of new artists coming out of South Africa in the last few years. A lot of really talented producers and the scene is really growing. We had Ultra Music festival coming to South Africa, we had Ultra Cape Town and Ultra Johannesburg. We played at both of those. It was really cool and really great to be able to be a part of the Ultra family all around the world playing here in Miami and fingers crossed we’ll be playing in a few more.
So are we going to see you at Tomorrowland?
Who knows? Sure!
Finally, what do you think is the importance of an artist to have his own personal style? Deadmau5 has his head thing going on, Markus Schulz always wears black. What’s the importance of guy to have his own style?
Well I think the most important thing for any artist is that we’re making music here. You could have an identity for the sound that you make. You can listen to an artist and if you don’t know the track, you’ll hopefully be able to recognize the style and identity of the artist in the music. That’s what we are trying to achieve and hopefully when you play someone a Goldfish track, they can hear it’s got that DNA code. Fine you can have an image, wear mask heads, wear only black or whatever it is that you want to do but music comes first always.
