1 day Ago By Mikala Lugen
isn’t just a saying to ODESZA. As one of the biggest electronic acts in the world, Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight have built up their global following by surrounding themselves with people who not only believe in their but help bring it to life. In fact, the band’s creative leads are very much considered members of ODESZA themselves.
Particularly, . As a longtime friend of Mills and Knight dating back to their college years at Western Washington University, Kusanagi has played a pivotal role in the creation and evolution of ODESZA. “I actually ended up introducing Harrison and Clay because I knew both of them and that they were doing separate projects,” Kusanagi says.
“Clay was doing Beaches, and Harrison doing Catacomb Kid. I was living with Clay at the time, kind of near our senior year, and I told the guys they should really just get together and play some music.” When he encouraged Mills and Knight to meet, Kusanagi didn’t envision that the pair would end up forming one of the most renowned touring acts in the country or that it would forever change the course of his own career.
Early gigs in ODESZA’s career saw Kusanagi wearing all sorts of different hats, from touring with the band, to playing guitar on the duo’s 2012 album , to mapping lasers on the band’s Last Goodbye tour, Kusanagi evolved as a powerhouse creative force in his own right as the band ascended to stardom. “My role is to make sure that all of the creative elements are working together,” Kusanagi says of his current role in ODESZA. “We’ve always been obsessed with cinema and movies and building cinematic-type experiences.
And the show’s no different. It is like we’re telling a narrative, we’re really building a movie on stage for people to see.” “Music drives everything and being able to work so closely with my friends Harrison and Clay and thinking as a whole cohesive entity is where just a lot of the magic happens,” Kusanagi continues.
“Sometimes it’s a visual that sparks the audio and sometimes the audio sparks a visual or a laser moment or a pyro moment or a costuming moment or a choreography moment. My goal is to just build a world on the stage so that when people show up, they feel immersed for those 90 minutes to two hours and feel like they live inside of this ‘ODESZA world’ that can only exist right then and there.” We asked Kusanagi what he believes to be the main innovative components that have changed ODESZA’s live shows over the past two decades.
Creative Innovation 1: Drumline & Visual Musicality Creative Innovation 2: Pyrotechnics Creative Innovation 3: Visuals Creative Innovation 4: Lasers ODESZA brought out allll the lasers for The Last Goodbye Finale.
