Five Minutes With Odesza

For Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight, aka Odesza, the word slow burn is a mutually agreed upon description when trying to summate their musical journey from 2012 to now. Emerging onto the international electronic music scene four years ago, Odesza have worked tirelessly to become one of the world's biggest electronic acts. Come 2016, their efforts and fiercely loyal fan-base speak for themselves. We had a chat to Clayton about their highly anticipated tour Down Under and what they’ve been up to whilst gallivanting around the world.

You’re in Brazil at the moment, you guys are playing shows, and how’s the touring going? It seems like it’s been really non-stop in return. How are you guys feeling? Must be getting pretty exhausted by now.

Yeah it’s been a long road and we basically have not stopped. We’ve just been kind of on the road, and working and developing a lot of shows as much as possible. We did have a recent couple months break where we got to see some family and started kind of the process of writing some new material but unfortunately we did have to get back on the road and do a couple more shows, but lots of time off here and in the near future to get the writing process I think really going. And for some new material which would be great.

 Yeah cool man. It must get a little bit frustrating, you don’t get to sort of sit down and work on a bit of new music. Have you got something on the boiler at the moment or is it just waiting to get that time off after the Australian tour?

Yeah it can be frustrating because especially once you start- we had that little time off and we did really kind of get into the head space for writing and kind of had to jump right back on the bandwagon. But it is important doing shows and getting out here and playing for people and this next round we’re doing a lot of areas we don’t usually do. I mean right now we’re in South America, it’s our first time down here doing shows and it’s been a really amazing experience. So don’t wanna downplay any of that but definitely am excited to get home and really lock in some new stuff and work on some new material.

Yeah awesome. You touched on the live show before. It seems like it’s been growing and growing. How’s it going for you guys? Is what you’re doing now, is that kinda close to what we’ll be getting when you guys get down to Australia in a couple of months?

Yeah. The show has- that has been one good thing about a number of shows- you kind of realize what works and what doesn’t. We’ve really focused on revamping all the material so that it works in these settings and bouncing off ideas in a live setting which has become really fun, adding live elements. So the show you’ll see when we come over will be a full-band set up with some bigger production. So we’ll have two horn players with as well as a guitar player with us, and we’ll be performing drums with some new equipment, some live drums as well. It’s a process and it’s been a little more rewarding for us. It’s kind of helping the show enter in this very unique thing. We play all music and take pride in doing that and it’s connected with the fans I think in a way and we’ve been able to develop a show that’s very unique.

Yeah cool. You mentioned the fans. It seemed like it was a bit of a slow burn for you guys to start off with…was that kind of the goal when you guys started? To focus on just getting the music out and growing that fan base in a way that it seems it’s just really paid off for you guys now in the last couple of years?

Yeah that was a big part of when we started. We do believe in releasing music for free and having a lot of access to it. We respected artists that were doing that like Freelife was doing that before a lot of people were, and yeah released the albums for free and brought out music for free and that was a very cool idea and pretty new at the time. So we responded with that and you know its all about sharing and with todays music scene there’s jut so much out there, so getting people to even hear your music in the first place is a big task. It’s not about the radio play and stuff that it was. It’s interesting to see where the music is going and how it’s been developed and then I think how it’s being performed. So these next couple of years are gonna be pretty exciting for electronic music and where it goes.

Yeah totally. And is that watching where its going; is that kinda of where the idea for the Foreign Family Collective came from? How’s that going?

Yeah we obviously are big fans of Australian music and have loved coming over and playing there for you guys. And you guys- the sound coming out of Australia has been a huge influence on us. But the Foreign Family kinda started just, we were on Soundcloud so much and exploring the online music scene continuously, and in the process of doing that there’s so many talented young producers. So the whole point of the label was to give young kids and people who we thought deserved a little more recognition and a little help to get started, the opportunity to produce us, so like Jai Wolf and Big Wild, these people we’ve been fans of for a while, and we knew a lot of other people would they just didn’t know how to really reach a large fan base. So the whole goal was really just to kind of give them that little leg up to share their music and we believe in them just as much as the next. So excited to see what happens to the label and artists that are on it.

Odesza are playing Groovin The Moo across Australia, as well as headlining sideshows across capital cities (Click here for info/tickets).

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