STACK September 2017 Issue 155

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032 SEPTEMBER 2017
visit MUSIC NEWS
ODESZA
Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight have created an intricate masterpiece
which spans the organic/electronic divide in Odesza's new album A
Moment Apart. Mills spoke with Zoë Radas.
are beautiful. And I [want to] add a beautiful
melancholy, a cinematic sound. I always liked
feeling like it was a tidal wave hitting you at the
beginning of the song, but it starts very filtered,
so you can’t hear a lot of it, it’s super low, and
then it all comes at once. And I love those
moments that kind of wake you up out of the
song and make you more alert and pay attention
to what’s happening.
How do you find and store samples
you might want to use later? I imagine
Dumbledore’s hoard of memories in
Hogwarts, little snippets floating around in
glass jars in a storeroom.
I come from a hip hop background, sampling
old records. When I was younger I just collected
records from Goodwill, and then I started going
on YouTube and finding record collectors. I would
email them and be like “Hey, if I give you 50
bucks will you give me some of your vinyl rips,
stuff you’ve transferred to your computer?” I
would just scour the internet. I always had fun
trying to find these really eclectic channels on
YouTube and weird labels [who had] the sound of
a bell, or the sound of an exotic instrument, and
try to blend all those together. You gotta broaden
your horizons to get the right stuff I think.
Do you think your use of organic or acoustical
sounds is how you manage not to lose the
humanity in what are, essentially, artificially-
arranged tracks?
I think that’s kind of the constant balance
and struggle in creating songs that we like.
Because we love the warmth and the human
aspect of a lot of standard musical instruments
and orchestral instruments and some funk stuff,
and trying to blend that with different, more
surreal and synthetic things to create stylistic
approach to a lot of genre-blending. A lot of it
is cutting and chopping and [meshing] all these
things to try and make something cohesive out
of things that maybe shouldn’t all live together.
I love trying to build that. I think a lot of happy
accidents go into what we do.
Like Bob Ross?
You mean my muse? Yes, a happy little tree,
here and there.
In Line Of Sight, the bass synth is almost
terrifying in its size. It’s like the terror/sublime
binary in literature and art. Do you think of
any of these instruments or elements are
being scary in their beauty?
There is a lot of power behind things that
You worked with both Leon Bridges and
Regina Spektor on this record.These are
two titan vocalists, but they’re still not the
usual people you’d expect to be collaborating
on an electronic or dance record.Were you
deliberately trying to look outside of the
usual pool of singers?
I think that we are just fans of a lot of different
kinds of music and we always try to think of
a fun way that we can work with someone
who doesn’t seem like they should work with
us. I think sometimes that makes the best
collaboration. Obviously that doesn’t work all the
time, but when it does work it’s usually a very
inspiring moment.
How did you meet Regina?
With Regina Spektor we kind of jokingly asked
for her to be on the album to our management,
just because we didn’t think it would be feasible
at all, and about two months later she
emailed us back really excited to work
with us. We wrote this little demo for
her and we sent it to her and she said,
"I wrote a whole song to this, but I don’t
want to send it to you, I want you to hear
it live."
We met her in Seattle; she was
playing a show, we went to her hotel,
up to the 40th floor, we knocked on
her door, we were super nervous, we
walk in, we meet her entire family, her
kids and her husband and everyone, and we sat
down. She played the track off her computer and
sang to us with her eyes closed. Sitting on the
couch in her hotel room. It was one of the most
beautiful things I’ve ever seen! Like a private
Regina Spektor concert. It was a pretty jaw-
dropping moment for me.
Y’know it’s funny, that song had a lot of
production on it, and we decided to make it
really about that moment that we got to hear
her singing, and strip it back and pull a lot of our
production out of it – make it more about the
song and her voice, this beautiful airy vocal. And
the lyrics are so meaningful. We didn’t want to
take meaning away from that, and really let that
shine. We wanted to transport people there.
You really succeeded – you’ve let her voice be
exactly as beautiful as it is in any of her own
music, without crowding it.
I think a lot of the time, vocalists are a little
uncertain on whether they want to work with
producers because I can only assume that when
your instrument is your voice, that’s maybe the
most personal instrument that can exist. And
it’s probably a scary thing to walk into a room
with [people] like us who’re known for cutting
up vocals and pitching them all around. It was a
really cool moment and we’ve grown to be really
good friends; I call her every month, and she’s
a great person, and I feel honoured that she
worked with us. ZKR
continued
A Moment
Apart by
Odesza is out
September 8
via Pod/Inertia.