Light Up

Seattle melotronica combo Odesza are already on Hollywood's radar, even though they're yet to drop an album. Their remix of Pretty Lights' Lost And Found turned up on the blockbuster Divergent soundtrack. Not that Harrison Mills has seen the dystopian YA movie. “I just never got around to it,” he confesses. “We've basically been on tour for the last, I don't know, eight months.” Nevertheless, Mills and his Odesza partner Clayton Knight still can't believe their luck. “That experience has been amazing. I mean, that line-up of artists who are on that soundtrack [like Zedd, Ellie Goulding and Kendrick Lamar] are all really huge influential people, [people] who are way bigger than us, so to be along those lines with those people, it's really cool.”

Odesza are touring Australia for the first time, headlining Perth's Circo festival. This, Mills reveals, is his first-ever Australian interview. And Odesza will be playing live. The otherwise good-humoured Mills admits to feeling frustrated that some punters assume they're DJing on laptops. “I get it because people just don't know the difference anymore – and that's fine – but it does, like, grind my ears a little bit when someone comes up and goes, 'Great DJ set!' It's like, no! All those songs are ours – we made them.” Odesza just appeared at their inaugural Coachella, on The Do LaB stage. “Coachella was really fun,” Mills, originally from California, enthuses. “We were really worried that people weren't gonna show up to our set 'cause we were going up against the heavy-hitters [including Skrillex] who were closing the night – so we were lucky enough to have some people come out.”

Odesza only formed in 2012. Both Mills and Knight had been studying at Western Washington University and were independently involved in electronic music. The basement producers took their handle from the Ukrainian port of Odessa. “I think for us a big part of using the name was that it just sounded really mysterious – it's like a foreign place we've never been to.” But they modified the spelling when an Internet search threw up another outfit called Odessa – a UK hardcore band.

Odesza premiered with the free EP (virtually an album) Summer's Gone – two tracks of which topped Hype Machine's Popular chart. Bloggers loved their fusion of melodic electronica, glitch and bass, Knight having studied classical and jazz piano and Mills being a '90s hip hopper. Last year they followed with the My Friends Never Die EP, influenced by gigging.

It was Pretty Lights (aka Derek Smith) initially approached Odesza to remix One Day They'll Know. They've also toured with him. However, Smith hasn't necessarily mentored them. “Surprisingly, we haven't had too many conversations with him directly. But he's one of the biggest heavy-hitters in electronic music and I've been a fan of his for a really long time. For him to have us open for him was a huge honour – and to have us remix one of his tracks was even bigger. So that was an amazing experience. It opened a lot of doors for us. I gotta thank him a lot for that.”

Odesza consider themselves as belonging to a post-EDM movement. In one blog interview Mills described their sound as “classy electronic”, while Knight tagged it “pretty music where it isn't just noise.” Odesza, who have their own NO.SLEEP mixtape series, don't listen to obvious electronica but rather ambient or experimental fare. (Mills has lately been enjoying chillwaver Toro Y Moi's Anything In Return, “which is indie, but it's got some cool little weird sample stuff in there.”)

Odesza have “almost” completed their debut proper, Mills says, with the 2014 single, Sun Models, featuring Madelyn Grant. They're developing their sound. “There's gonna be a lotta different stuff on this album – and that's something we're really proud to kind of expose, the things we like. I think it's gonna be a lot more cinematic, there's definitely gonna be some fun pop song stuff on there, but also some more ambient stuff and some bigger-building symphonic-type stuff. So it's gonna have a lot of pieces of what we like I guess scattered and mixed together – a complete blend into one cohesive sound.” What's more, Odesza have brought in vocalists, although Mills can't divulge them all. “That's something new about the album – we've worked with lots of vocalists. It's a lot more collaborative-based there, too. It's not as much just stealing sounds from the internet (laughs).”

Word is that until recently Mills, who studied New Media and Design at college, fancied becoming a cartoonist. Might Odesza utilise his drawings? “I would love to do that again – it's kinda just something I haven't had time for. I think my illustration style's a lot goofier than our music, so I don't know what I could get away with in connection to Odesza, but I definitely wanna keep doing that somewhere down the road.”