Emerging from the rich landscape of New Zealand drum & bass, The Upbeats first came together over a mutual love of the ocean.

The first encounter between Downie Wolf and Terror Snake: did the earth shake and the ocean boil?

Terror Snake: Haha indeed, well the ocean boiled at least. We met in high school through a shared love of bodyboarding. So the first few years together revolved around missions to the beach, and slowly but steadily converting Dylan (Downie Wolf) from his rock ways into an electronic, D&B listening raver!

As performers, how do you two interact on stage?

We like to keep things open here. Unlike most duos who DJ together we like to play back to back, one tune for one tune. It means we're both constantly doing something, and it means we have to communicate a lot about where we want to take the music. It's awesome, it keeps us really engaged when we perform!

Drum n bass in 2012; where is the genre headed stylistically?

The last two years it has felt like drum & bass has been really polarised. On one side labels like Ram and Hospital Records were releasing big commercial sounding songs that seemed like they were aimed directly at UK radio play. On the other end of the spectrum, there was a thriving scene for moody, deep minimal D&B. Now that's cool, there are aspects of both of those sounds that we like. But it really did feel like there was a gaping hole in the middle ground.

Do you guys have another artist album in the works... if so, what kind of musical broth are you cooking up?

We're furiously working right now on finishing our next Upbeats album before we head back to Europe in mid April. So we have about five weeks to get it all wrapped up! We've also signed it to a label we're extremely excited to be working with, more info on that soon! And I think this album is definitely the most banging, energetic dancefloor album we will have done to date. Having said that we're already hatching plans to write another album of strictly leftfield, introspective shoegaze D&B... one day.

The Upbeats play The Outlook Festival launch party at the Jubilee Hotel Saturday March 10.