Firefly 2014 interview: NYC's Ghost Beach
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Ghost Beach, by the way, comes from the R.L. Stine Goosebumps series.
City Paper had the chance to meet with a couple of artists on the lineup of this past weekend's Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Del. Self-proclaimed "tropical grit-pop" duo Ghost Beach, out of New York City, discussed their sound, the way they approach live performance and online music piracy.
In 2013, Josh Ocean and Eric "Doc" Mendelsohn had their song "Miracle" appear in an online ad for clothing brand American Eagle. Along with that, AE paid for a billboard in Times Square that the guys could use for anything for two weeks.
"We didn't just want to put up a Ghost Beach ad, [we thought] let's use this billboard to have a discussion about something. Something we feel passionate about is the way music has been on the forefront of the advancement of the internet," Ocean said.
So they used the billboard to launch the Artists vs. Artists campaign, using the hashtags #ArtistsAgainstPiracy and #ArtistsForPiracy to invite people to decide what, exactly, piracy meant to artists. The billboard scrolled messages like "Piracy is our generation," "Piracy is inevitable" or "Piracy is unethical," and invited people to pick a side and vote online. More people ended up voting for piracy on Ghost Beach's website.
It went a little viral, and even John McCrea, lead singer of Cake, was speculating on Facebook about Ghost Beach being held up by "a multibillion tech corporation." ("His fanbase kind of reacted like, 'Dude, shut the fuck up,'" Ocean said. For the record, American Eagle has given bands billboard space before.)
"We're in favor of using the internet in a way that protected people's intellectual property, like Spotify, like Pandora...the solution is not limiting the internet or censoring the internet, but using it to our advantage," Ocean explained.
Ghost Beach built a following giving away MP3s and releasing music for free, as well as having tracks available for purchase on iTunes.
"You'd be surprised, we sold a lot of them," Mendelsohn said.
"We had more sales than free downloads," Ocean agreed.
The pair's opinions on our age in music aside, they are naturally dynamic performers. At Firefly, the considerable crowd at the Ghost Beach show had caught the unstoppable energy of the two, who bounced and shouted and "woo!"-ed their way through the set, even sending giant potted plants from the stage into the fray to crowd surf.
"Both of us are kind of high-strung, and we like to have a good time with people, and our set ends up feeling like that," Ocean said.
"I think it's like an inclusive thing, we want to feel like it's a party together, we try to make it as unique as possible to where we were today," Mendelsohn said.
The guys use music production software from Abelton, like the colored keypads that control their samples and instruments, to create their unique sound. 
"We wanted something new, something fresh...there's a lot of [technological] things that are happening that we use to facilitate the sound that we want," Mendelsohn said.
"I think the cool thing is the way these programs work, people are becoming savvy with them. It's facilitating artists like us to build these rigs that in the past only, like, The Edge had something like this. This software allows us to do it," he continued.
Ghost beach is doing a full U.S. Canadian tour promoting their debut album, Blonde, along with the group Cherub. Check them out at ghostbeachmusic.com.
