The Seattle duo Odesza has become known for its lush, even sentimental spin on electronic music. Many of the songs on the group's latest album, In Return, feature vocalists singing wistful lyrics about longing and desire.
"Electronic music can get really weird," says Clayton Knight, one-half of the group. "And I think we've made it, in some way, more accessible. It has a pop element to it that allows people to get involved with it."
Knight and his bandmate Harrison Mills met just a few years ago, as college students at Western Washington University. At the time, they got a kick out of mixing music from vinyl records they bought at Goodwill with harsher elements — like the sound of dinner plates breaking against walls. These days, they draw their material from all kinds of places.
"'Bloom' is a track that we think defines a lot of the stuff we think about and try to show in our music," Knight says. "It's got this slowed-down hip-hop drum, with two different languages playing on top of a bunch of synth works. It's just all over the place, but they all sit together in unison."
Odesza plays to audiences all over the world, and their songs fill dance clubs. Both musicians say what they really want to do is make music that sounds intimate and personal — music for your headphones — but that their live shows teach them a lot about who's out there listening.
"A lot of our albums we build to be personal experiences in the background of your life — whereas our live show is a totally different beast," Mills says. "We'll go and play a show in San Francisco, and you'll have, like, a 55-year-old designer, next to a 14-year-old raver kid. I think that's amazing that you can bring those people together to come see one show."
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