We had the opportunity to sit down with South African live dance music duo Goldfish before their gig with Gramatik at Best Buy Theater last month. Not only are they super talented, but these guys are witty, hilarious, and nice as hell! Our conversation delved into their origins, their feelings on the big-name DJs they’ve been known to spoof in their music, and what they’ve got in the works since the release of 2013’s Three Second Memory. Check it out!

Don’t miss Goldfish at the Official BUKU Fest Afterparty on 3/14, or when they take their Organic House Tour to NYC’s Highline Ballroom on 3/26! Full US tour dates at the bottom.

L4LM: Has anyone ever confused you with the delicious cheese-flavored crackers of the same name?

Goldfish: Not in real life, but we do every so often get some Twitter abuse, “stale cracker!” or “the pizza flavor doesn’t taste right!” But it’s normally in caps like, “THIS PIZZA FLAVOR IS STALE!!!” “THIS FLAVOR BLASTED STUFF’S CRAP!!!”. Actually sometimes we’ve messed with them and replied like we are them, like, “sorry, we’ll try harder next time.”

L4LM: Where’d you guys meet and how’d you go from being classically trained jazz musicians to this kind of livetronica, dance style of music that Goldfish evolved into today?

Goldfish: (Dom) We were both studying at the University of Cape Town doing music degrees, and Dave and I played in a jazz band first. We started playing jazz clubs as a quartet and we did thousands of gigs, anything from hotel lobbies to birthday parties to weddings, we did it all. And while we were doing that, we’d try to get our friends to come to our gigs and they were like, “oh, that was really cool, but back to my life.” And then we were really into a lot of electronic music that had jazzy overtones like Fatboy Slim or St. Germain, Moby even, and we were kinda like, well we dig this stuff, we play these instruments, we could make this stuff. So we did, we made a track in Dave’s dorm room and gave it to his buddy who DJed it the next night and people went crazy. Fast-forward a few years later and here we are.

L4LM: So you both play an array of instruments, who plays what in the band, and when you’re playing samples are they your own that you create in the studio?

Goldfish: (Dave) I play the sax and the flute live and Dom plays double bass and keyboards. We have Ableton live as the heartbeat, and that’s running our specially made tracks and loops and samples.

[someone walks into the room]

Wow, I’m just sitting here and people walk in and compliment me! It’s amazing! Imagine when I stand up! So basically that’s just how our live show goes, we just sit here and people come in and say “well done!”

L4LM: So 2013 saw the release of Three Second Memory, can you guys catch us up with what you’ve been up to this past year?

Goldfish: We’ve got a lot of stuff going on, we’ve been doing a ton of remixes, singles and collaborations. We’ve got a collaboration with Dutch DJ Bakermat that was just featured in the Ultra aftermovie for the Europe party. We’ve got a collaboration with a French guy called DIMMI coming out, we did a remix of Rodriguez’s “Sugarman,” which got to number one on Hype Machine, which was pretty cool. We also did a remix of Wyclef Jean ft. Avicii’s “Divine Sorrow.”

L4LM: Speaking to that, you guys have some remixes by other DJs on the album, how did those come to be?

Goldfish: The past few years we’ve had a lot of remixes done but we ended up going for quality, and I think what happened now is we’ve located quite a few guys who are like-minded and have a similar aesthetic and are really awesome. We have a couple of German guys, this one called Lexer who’s a really amazing deep house guy, and Alle Farbin who’s another really great producer. We’re just lucky we’ve found some really cool guys, and now we’re doing a remix for Lexer as well, so it’s working out quite well these days. There’s quite a cool little scene developing in Europe with this kind of tropical house, melodic house vibe, and we’ve been hanging out with these guys and doing shows with them, and it’s very exciting and super cool. And it’s catching on in America now!

L4LM: So a lot of your videos are animations, do you work with a particular animator and what’s the inspiration behind these videos?

Goldfish: Well we started with the main guy, Mike Scott. He mailed us years ago when we were releasing our second album and wanted to make a music video for us. And we were like, don’t know who you are but make us something and we’ll check it out! So he made us a little 10-second clip of Goldfish Man, and we had a good laugh and said sweet, let’s do something. And from there it’s turned into its own little monster, I mean there’s our music and then the videos are just their own thing. And even the comments that come from YouTube work themselves into the music as well! I think it’s cool cause a lot of dance music just has terrible music videos of like chicks by the pool, that kind of thing, and we wanted to create a different angle.

Goldfish – One Million Views from Goldfish live on Vimeo.

L4LM: The video for “One Million Views” was kind of a commentary on DJ culture, featuring animated cameos from big-name DJs. What was the story behind that?

Goldfish: Well first I just want to say that “One Million Views” has reached one million views! So that’s a little bit embarrassing! Basically the song has a kind of autobiographical content in the lyrics, and since there was such a story in the song already Mike Scott just kind of took it and ran with it, and then came up with this idea of the little kid DJs and school, and then brought in the dog DJ character who’s the villain, and it basically developed organically like that from the song. It’s also a bit of a joke, but people take it way too seriously.

L4LM: Do you guys ever feel that you’re overlooked because you’re not one of those DJs just kind of pressing play and hitting certain predetermined peaks?

Goldfish: Well it just kind of is what it is and I think that’s on its way out anyway. We’re really happy where we’re at. We’re not trying to make genetically modified music.

L4LM: So you guys seem to be influenced by a lot of different genres, in your free time do you find yourselves listening to more funk, dance-based music, anything in particular?

Goldfish: Everything. It could be classical, it could be Nirvana…we don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves from an inspirational point of view, and whatever we’re listening to could be inspirational. It’s like one foot in the past and one in the future. That’s what we’ve always been about, the smash of analog and digital, and it’s the same for the inspirations. It could be a Beatles track or the latest Lexer track. 

Photos by Matthew Enbar