Dark Star

"Pretty much the only decent place in Ballarat is a place called the Karova Lounge, which is the only live music venue in the town. Anybody who likes music or that kind of thing goes to the Karova on a Thursday, or a Friday, or a Saturday night, or whatever,” explains Fuller, laboring his pronunciation to perhaps hint at a mote of frustration. “When we were growing up and playing in bands and that, that was where we played our first show. That was where Gold Fields played their first show, actually. They support a lot of young bands and that sort of thing, so I'd say that would pretty much be it. Maybe. I don't know what else to do in Ballarat.”

Fact sheet: Gold Fields are a five-piece out of Ballarat, Victoria; and the five sides of the pentagon are Fuller, Vin Andanar, Ryan D'Sylva, Rob Clifton and Luke Peldys. Nobody's really invented a genre for them yet, but Gold Fields draw on the mid-2000s peak of Australian popular electronica; which is fortuitous, considering Midnight Juggernauts (the greatest Australian electronica breakout that never happened) are going through the motions of releasing a new record. Appearing on the Unearthed sonar in late 2010, the long arm of London hype snatched Gold Fields by the neck almost immediately. By July 2011, Gold Fields inked a deal with Astralwerks; a coup d'etat following the precedent of their principal comparison, Empire Of The Sun.

“With the triple j Unearthed thing, we put a song up on there and about a month later, a record label in London wanted to put out that song over there and we played a few shows over there,” Fuller explains. “It was our tenth show ever, and it was in the UK. So all of a sudden we had to get our life together and learn how to be a band pretty quickly. The label is an indie vinyl label, it's called Young and Lost Club. At the time they'd just put out a Noah & The Whale jingle before they did our one, so there was a couple of bands on there that we knew, and it just seemed like an opportunity to not miss. So we ended up having to take out a loan to fly over.

“While we were in high school, when we started making music and that sort of thing, a lot of the music in Ballarat was folk music and alternative rock music, and so we sort of… it felt like when we started writing more pop music we were doing something not against everybody else, but doing something different to what everybody else was doing in town,” Fuller returns to the topic of the band's origins. “That, in a way, made us want to keep doing things that way, and I think at the time around when we finished school and turned legal age, we started going out in Melbourne and all that, it was around the time The Presets put out Apocalypso and Cut Copy and that whole Modular records sort of thing that came out,” Fuller concludes.

Appropriately under the stewardship of manager Scott Horscroft (The Presets, Sleepy Jackson), the band released their five-track self-titled EP to modest acclaim in September 2011. This year saw the realisation of Gold Fields' glistening debut LP Black Sun, a seemingly direct descendent of the sound approximated by Cut Copy, Ladyhawke, The Presets, Pnau and Empire Of The Sun, but most concisely, Van She. It's music that captures popular appeal because it takes advantage of the scale of electronic production and its efficiency, dream-pop with sprawling synthesizers, but enough residual string-instrumentation to keep the suffix rock. So far, it's been a fortuitous run for this young band.