Interview with Sean Kusanagi: ECHOES ODESZA Installation

“It needs a team” isn’t just a saying for ODESZA. As one of the biggest electronic bands in the world, Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight have built their global fan base by surrounding themselves with people who not only believe in their vision, but help make it happen. In fact, the band’s creative leaders are largely considered members of ODESZA.

In particular, SOUND+VISION award winner Sean Kusanagi. A longtime friend of Mills and Knight dating back to their days at Western Washington University, Kusanagi played a key role in the formation and evolution of ODESZA.

“I actually ended up introducing Harrison and Clay because I knew both of them and knew they were doing separate projects,” Kusanagi says. “Clay was doing BeachesBeaches and Harrison was doing Catacombkid. I was living with Clay at the time, about my senior year, and I told the guys that we should just get together and play some music.”

When he encouraged Mills and Knight to meet, Kusanagi had no idea the pair would eventually form one of the most iconic live bands in the country, nor that it would forever change the course of his own career. ODESZA’s early performances saw Kusanagi wearing many hats, from touring with the band to playing guitar on the duo’s 2012 album. Summer is overFrom laser mapping on the Last Goodbye tour, Kusanagi evolved into a powerful creative force in his own right as the band’s popularity grew.

“My role is to make sure all the creative elements work together,” Kusanagi says of her current role at ODESZA. “We’ve always been fascinated by cinema and movies and creating cinematic experiences. And a show is no different. It’s like we’re telling a story, really building a movie on stage for people to see.”

“The music drives everything, and being able to work so closely with my friends Harrison, Clay, and Luke (Tanaka) thinking as a cohesive whole is where all the magic happens,” Kusanagi continues. “Sometimes the visuals trigger the sound, and sometimes the sound triggers the visuals, or the laser moment, or the pyrotechnic moment, or the costume moment, or the choreographic moment. My goal is to just build a world on stage so that when people come in, they feel immersed for that 90 minutes to two hours and feel like they’re living in this ‘ODESZA world,’ which can only exist then and there.”

We asked Kusanagi what he felt were the main innovative elements that had changed ODESZA’s live performances over the past two decades.

Creative Innovation 1: Drumline and Visual Musicality

So that was one of the first elements that we really brought to life, going back to around 2015 or 2016. ODESZA being an electronic band, they wanted to bring a live orchestra and musicality to a show that is consistently made of computers and electronic elements. I think a lot of people would agree that it’s not very interesting to watch someone behind a computer. So that explored the question of how do we bring to life all the elements of their music, which is so layered and so textural and has so many different types of world samples? That was really the first thing that excited us.

The first thing we tried was adding some drums. Harrison and Clay initially just started playing on stage, actually bringing a drum kit there. They brought SPDs, toms, and a crash to just add some of that initial energy, because that was all they had at the time.

But we wanted it to be bigger as the shows got bigger. It’s not enough to just have them playing drums. So we hired a drum line to represent a lot of those rhythms and styles. It was almost 10 years ago that we started working with the University of Colorado drum line, and what’s cool is some of those members are still with us to this day.

We wanted to continue building on the cinematic musicality of ODESZA. That’s when we thought about adding string elements and we brought strings to one of the first ODESZA shows at Red Rocks. That was the moment when we started to realize that there were so many possibilities to build not only around these electronic moments, but around these musical and orchestral moments and bring them to life. ODESZA was building on this “cinematic” quality that was and still is very forward-thinking.

Creative Innovation 2: Pyrotechnics

It’s really easy to just put an explosion in the show because we have the money and it’ll just pump up the audience. But for us, it comes back to, “What’s the motivation? Why are we doing this?” We want to think about why we’re doing this and why it makes sense to add any creative element to a live show.

So for us, yes, pyro is a huge part of our show, but we also want to make sure that it’s motivated by how everything works together. I’ll use “Loyal” as an example here, where we have this army of drummers on stage and we have this king who comes back from the dead. They’re bringing this loyal king back to life. And at that point we’re like, oh, fire makes so much sense to add to the stage, just because we have this very almost warlike battle scene, both with the drum line and the visuals. The fire helps to accentuate that.

We use pyrotechnics to tell the story of the ODESZA world we live in.

One of the challenges with pyrotechnics is the many different stage formats we find ourselves in. With the drum line, we have a lot of people on stage, sometimes 16 people, and we’re trying to set off fireworks at the same time. We had to do a lot of choreography or rework the positioning of the stage to make sure it worked on certain stages. The whole thing is underrated, which is why you don’t see it very often.

We’ve been incorporating pyrotechnics for the last five years, but it was on The Last Goodbye tour that we really dug into it and built a time code around our pyrotechnics and special effects like confetti. We planned every second. Every moment is planned down to the millisecond of when it happens, how it goes off, how it shoots during the show.

Creative Innovation 3: Visualizations

The brain behind the visuals is my partner Luke Tanaka. He is the leader in many ways, but he collaborates with 30-40 artists from all over the world to create the visuals for the ODESZA shows.

We can plan out the show and the type of visuals for each song, and then work with these really talented artists from all over the world to create the narrative behind each show. It’s really Harrison, Clay, Luke and I who decide what style we want the visuals to have. Is it animation? Is it Cinema 4D, is it surreal? Is it post-production?

What type of program do we want to use? What type of visual artists do we want to work with?

An example is our work with Aeforia, an amazing artist from Canada who has done a lot of album and cover designs. He created these characters and then we started using them as the main representation of the Last Goodbye souls, which you could actually see inflated in the Gorge and which are also just kind of a narrative tie between everything in the show.

We really try to avoid building a classic three-part loop for every song, which is a format you can see multiple times, and instead delve into what is the actual narrative of the show, how do all of these visuals play and intersect with each other? And then, most importantly, what type of visualization do you want to present the music in a completely new way so that when someone comes to the show, they have an experience of the song that evokes something different and allows them to hear it in a completely new light.

Creative Innovation 4: Lasers

We’ve been using lasers for a long time, but we’ve perfected them specifically for The Last Goodbye tour.

Specifically, the lasers that we brought to the Gorge were something completely new and unique. I think one thing we’ve always tried to do is that if we’re in a unique place (like the Gorge), we want it to be uniquely unique. So we wanted to see how we could use lasers in new ways.

We actually put lasers behind the crowd and shot them all the way through the Gorge, with more power and lasers than ever before in that location. Projecting them onto the crowd and into the background created a vast area for people to move around. The amount we used was the first ever done in that capacity in that location.

I think that’s also the core ethos of each of these things. How has it been done in the past and how can we break that mold and how can we recontextualize it or reconstruct it in a way that feels like it always belonged in that set? And even if it’s pushing the boundaries of visuals or worldbuilding or lasers or pyrotechnics, the most important thing for everything is that it works together.

If it doesn’t work together, it falls apart. I actually think one of the most innovative things is just building it from friends and building it as a group of friends who have been together since the beginning and know that these are some of the biggest shows. I never thought I’d be in this position of being a creative director in front of Beyonce at Coachella, but to be able to look up and see myself doing it with my friends, sharing the stage with Beyonce or Eminem, and playing three sold-out nights at the Gorge, that’s everybody’s dream.