DEAR ESP 252, WHY CAN I NOT EVER GET YOU OUT OF MY HEAD? BY SCOTT STEFANI

“A concert?”, “A light show?” “A band?”, those were the questions I was asking myself Saturday night May 6th watching an outstanding performance by the group Odesza. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Odesza they are a popular group in the EDM music genre, one of their more popular songs is “Say my Name” according to billboard.com. I like EDM don’t get me wrong but I am not someone who follows it in depth or makes an effort to go to every concert or music festival, I really couldn’t have told you one song by Odesza before this “concert”. I didn’t know what I was walking into. After the first set I was in amazement. There was a combination of DJ sets, lights, videos, confetti, smog, drums, trumpets, trombones, violins, and guitars. There was anywhere from 1 to 15 people on the stage using any combination of the combined attributes. It was incredible, it was like anything I have never seen before. It wasn’t a concert it was a show, an outstanding performance. Being that the creative process has been drilled into my head I couldn’t help but think how did they achieve this. So many EDM artist get up stage jump around, DJ and have a bunch of lasers and lights flashing around but this was so much different, so much more. I found myself going through the creative process they may have been going through to achieve what they had. What was there goal when planning this tour, was it “How can we make this concert different from any other concert?” or “How can we leave the audience speechless”. Did they SCAMPER a normal show or did they just know they were going to incorporate live instruments all along? Did they just create an amazing light show or did they set out to make the show different by thinking creatively and making the lights just as important as the music? How did they set out to achieve something so different and creative that left an audience speechless? When returning to Oxford I got the questions like “How was it” and “Was it comparable to xyz” and my answer every time was it was so different than anything I have ever seen and it was the best show I have ever seen. This is coming from a guy who has seen Martin Garrix in Ibiza. It was creative genius.