We chat to the South African Live House Music duo ahead of two massive shows at ADE and Electric Brixton

 

MoS: For those who don’t know could you give a little intro to Goldfish, how do you describe your music to people that haven’t heard it?

Goldfish: Hi! We are Goldfish, two dudes from Cape Town who make live dance music. We love sushi, surfing and traveling the world. We call it organic house, it's house music with a strong focus on live instruments like saxophone, keyboards, flute, double bass (which we play between the two of us) and other acoustic instruments that give us our signature sound. It's the mash up between a band and DJ on stage and we try to give our dance sets that live experience.

 

How did the two of you meet and start working together?

We met at the University of Cape Town while studying jazz. We started playing together in a traditional jazz band but soon figured out we could mix our jazz skills with electronic elements after hearing St Germain's Tourist album and Goldfish was born.

 

You’re gearing up for two massive live shows one at ADE and another in Brixton, what have you got in store these shows?

We're super stoked for both of these. Amsterdam is sold out already, our 7th ADE show in a row sold out! We're teaming up with Bakermat and have invited some of our favourite acts to join us including Alle Farben, Lost Frequencies, DIMMI, Sam Feldt and Michael Calfan. From there we head to London to play the Electric Brixton on Saturday with Cleavage, DIMMI and Jolyon. It's basically music heaven for us. We're launching our new single, a re take of Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box" featuring an incredible 18 year old talent Julia Church on vocals and she smashed it out the park. Basically we can't wait for this weekend!

 

Have you been to ADE before? Do you have any conference survival tips?

Sleep as much as possible before you come to ADE as you won't be sleeping much during ADE! Book yourself two nights in a nice hotel after ADE to recover with green smoothies and gym sessions...

 

Your cover of “Heart Shaped Box” is due for release during ADE, can you give us some background to the track?

It actually came about while we were on tour in Colorado and we were playing a show at the legendary Belly Up Theatre in Aspen. The tech there was digging what we were doing at soundcheck and offered to set up an original Fender Rhodes keyboard for us to jam on with our setup. It's not often you get that outside of the studio! So anyway, somehow while we were playing the gig that classic guitar riff popped into my head while I was playing on the Fender. Dave looked at me and shouted "we gotta do a version of this!" The rest is history.

 

 

Are there any other grunge anthems you’d like to try your hand at?

It's always tricky as you want to do justice to the track first and foremost. I don't think we'd rush into it unless we had a good concept for it... maybe something by Stone Temple Pilots.

 

You guys are from South Africa, which has been getting a lot of international attention for it’s house music scene recently. Why is dance music so popular in SA?

In South Africa dance music has been getting major support on radio and from the public for at least the last 15 years or so. Kwaito (a slow South African Afro pop music) slowly evolved into a kind of hybrid African deep house in the early 2000's which blew up in a massive way taking deep house into mainstream media all over the country. This has led to overseas deep house producers having abnormally large amounts of followers in South Africa! Guys like Black Coffee are super stars here.

 

What do you have lined up for the rest of the winter?

Well it's going to be summer in the Southern Hemisphere and we have our Submerged Sundays residence starting 29th November at Shimmy Beach Club in Cape Town. It's an awesome outdoor club on the beach very similar to Ushuaia and we have 10 Sunday's in a row coming up. Our first guest is Stimming, and we have Wankelmut, plus a bunch of our favourite DJ's and producers joining us. Monday's are generally a disaster in Cape Town during that period!

 

Finally, England are already out of the Rugby World Cup and SA have Wales in the Quarter final, do you think they can go the distance and how do you explain the defeat to Japan?

It was the perfect karate kick in the pants for the Springboks to wake up and win the World Cup! We are looking better and better which is a good omen for the future games, Wales have shown that they are a formidable team but we should be able to roll them over and get into the Semi-finals!