INTERVIEW: miramar's Rosh Yau on supporting electronic music through the return of Club Miramar on 31 May “We’ve seen how powerful it is when you band together with people. It creates such magic.”

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 27 May 2025

Eora/Sydney three piece electronic band miramar, comprising of Rosh Yau (vocals), Sam Langley (producer), and Matt Sampson (producer), have been creating their lush, electronic-synth music since 2021, bringing them to the forefront of the under represented electronic pop scene in Australia.

Releasing their debut EP Sleepwalking in 2023, over the last 12 months they have released three perfectly crafted, joyous electronic-pop singles - ‘In The Morning’, ‘Work It Out’ plus ‘Highlight of My Week’, which saw the band take a sonic diversion into a slower, more indie leaning song.

Alongside their own music, miramar are also an important force in the local music community through their staging of Club Miramar nights across Sydney. The aim of the shows is to give a platform to other electronic artists in Sydney and showcase the depth of talent the city has in this genre.

Across multiple iterations over the past three years, Club Miramar has encompassed club nights, residencies, and DJ sets and on 31 May the event returns for its ninth occasion, taking over The Chippo in Chippendale. Artists will include Roxy Lotz, Grid, Dickie and miramar themselves.

miramar not only create thrilling pop music, but are committed to rising up other artists and giving back to the music community, and what they do is incredibly important and to be applauded. We recently sat down with lead singer Yau to chat about Club Miramar and the band’s music.

Hi Rosh, lovely to meet you and congratulations on everything you guys do. I’m quite excited by the fact that Club Miramar is back and this time at The Chippo which is a fantastic choice. Tell me everything this wonderful event.
This is our ninth one and our first ever one was at The Chippo, and it was also on the 31st of May, so it's the three year birthday to the date that we are going to be back at The Chippo with Club Miramar. We're so excited about it, it is our event for supporting live electronic music, bringing together community. It's definitely our little passion project, so we're very excited for it to be back.

Beautiful. As you said, you have built this little electronic music community in Sydney, did you feel it was born out of necessity, because Sydney is infamous with its issues with live venues, or were you just desperately craving a space to dance and play music with people?
Definitely a bit of both. Being in Sydney, there was just a huge gap for electronic music nights that wasn't DJ-ing. We still work with a lot of DJs in that space, because there's so much overlap anyway, but Sydney is so pub centric in its venues. We definitely, in the early days, adapted our sound to fit more of a pub style so we weren't disrupting the people in the bistro too much when playing our gig! But we were definitely craving getting back to our pure electronic roots. We didn’t know where to play it, so we thought we would just create a night for ourselves.

The venues [for Club Miramar] are still pubs by day, but we take over and make it a full immersive experience from start to finish. So when you come in, you can almost forget where you are and forget that you're on a busy street in Sydney and feel like you're in a club in Berlin and can just enjoy the night.

One thing that we have no control over is late nights. Venues still close very early in comparison to the European clubs, so we definitely have shifted our club nights to be a little earlier. That's something we're still working on with the Sydney culture, getting into the late night venues.

I do love that, and it is a key point that you are create the feeling that you're not just playing in a venue. It’s one thing to create an immersive space in a gallery for a visual art piece, but how do you see that translate with regards to your music and creating, not just a night, but a rabbit hole for people?
We are very detail focused when looking at this. It starts from when we pick a venue. We want to make sure whatever room we're playing in, that there's a bar in that room so people don't have to leave and come out of that world we're building to go get a drink, and you get stuck chatting with a friend in the room next door. We want to make sure that you've got everything you need in that space, and you can just optimise the time being on the dance floor. We've made a custom light show, and we use that for all the artists that are playing, so that it is that really dark clubby kind of feel that you often don't get in your regular pub.

We also have DJs playing in between all of the artists to keep that vibe going. We never want there to be a lull where people can leave and go back to their normal life. We want you to lose track of time. The music's constantly going and making sure we're building that tension and release in the lineup that we build as well.

Gorgeous. Speaking of the tone, I want to talk to you about your recent single, ‘Highlight Of My Week’, which is just so very other and stripped back, and it's almost the exhale after one of those nights out. You have this really amazing ability to turn emotional chaos into this kind of euphoria and this reflection, and I'm curious how you go about putting all of these big feelings into tracks people can always dance to?
For ‘Highlight Of My Week’, It was written retrospectively to that chaos, whereas some of our songs are really centred in that moment. When you are listening to it, it feels like a love letter to someone that just makes you want to stay out just a little bit longer because you want to have that time with them. But for us, the track was written as a love letter to live music and just wanting to stay out and enjoy it and really experience every weekend going out and searching for new music to listen to.

This one wasn't always meant to be a stripped back track. We always have a kind of signature miramar sound, and this one wasn't quite fitting within that more electronic, classic dance track that we lean towards when we're creating a song. We started just messing around, stripping it back, and being like what is this song asking from us, and we'll start from the beginning. When we stripped it back, we realised that is what it's asking from us. It didn't need frills and bells and whistles. It was just very raw in the messaging, and I think that's what it was asking for in the production as well. We were originally going to release it as an acoustic version, and then we were like, ‘No, this is the version’ and we ran with it. It's different to what we would normally make, but it's definitely one that we're still really proud of.

It's interesting, because there is now a real bleed with genres. On a hard rock album, you can also have ballads, and country can melt into hip hop, but it feels like with electronic music and artists it is still very much that's what it is. Do you think part of the fear of it something like ‘Highlight Of My Week’ stems from ‘but we're electronic artists’?
Yes, we definitely tried to fight it for a little while. We're not singer- songwriter, slow ballad kind of vibe. How are we going to play this in our set? But we really decided to let go and not box ourselves into that, and allow ourselves to explore, because who knows where those explorations in the future will take us? So we lent into it.

You've all come from coastal towns, small town spirit, tight knit DIY communities. Do you hear that in your music, and does that in some way propel your sound?
I'm not sure if I feel it in our sound, necessarily, but I definitely feel it in the way we approach music and the way we approach community within our music endeavours. Because we're from more rural areas, we're not from Sydney or any of the major cities, we are always thinking about those people still in those towns, and how to bring them together, even if it's not in the physical. Being in the city was something so exciting for us when we first moved here, and building a new network is something that we all had to experience. When we were moving into music for the first time, we didn't know anyone, we didn't have friends, we didn't know the other electronic artists in the scene. And now, we know we can build and foster community, because we've done it before, we can do it again. That's an experience that's such an asset to who we are as artists, because we know the importance of connection, the importance of fostering those relationships, and we’ve seen how powerful it is when you band together with people. It creates such magic, no matter where you are.

People will often ask, ‘do you think you'll move back to your town’? Or ‘do you think you'll move out of Sydney?’ My answer is always that I'm not necessarily tied to Sydney, but I'm tied to my community and my network here, because that's what makes this place important. It doesn't matter if you're in a rural town, if you're part of this community, that is where the importance is. So in that way, our rural, small town mindsets have really shaped how we have formed our network and our friendships and community within the music industry.

And look what you're doing, you're creating little experiences for everyone and it's really lovely. Before I leave you, we've got these worlds and these gorgeous clubs nights happening, but where else are you headed? What is your dream? What's up next?
So we've got an EP coming out in June. It is a real package of some songs that we've been holding on to for a long time, and some for a short time, but they all kind of fit together in this world that I think is a little different to what we are normally doing. There’s slower songs, we've got one that is a little more punky, but they all work together. This was our exploration EP, so we're really excited to have that out in the world, because we've been sitting with that for quite a while. We will go on a little tour when we release that, to play all the songs live.

After that, moving into the Australian summer, we want to get back into our dance tracks and be making some real dancey summer anthems. Because after sitting with our exploration, we've missed our roots, and we're excited to get back to some good old dance tracks.

Club Miramar will be held on 31 May at The Chippo, Chippendale, Sydney, from 2pm. Tickets are on sale now.‘Highlight of My Week’ is out now via Rupert George. You can download and stream here.
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