Inside the Mysterious Installation Odesza is revealed this week at The Gorge

For the past three years, of Odesza The Last Goodbye tour has performed 54 shows in 48 venues across North America, including headlining festivals such as Governor's Ball and Bonnaroo.

Tomorrow marks the beginning of his end. From July 4-6, Odesza will play the final three shows of The Last Goodbye at The Gorge Amphitheater, the iconic venue about 150 miles southeast of the duo's hometown of Seattle. 66,000 fans are expected over three nights, and if things go according to plan, almost everyone will pass through an on-site installation that the band has created as a tangible, extraordinary and this time truly final farewell.

Called Echoes, the installation is made of six 30-foot towers, 120 LED screens and a host of cutting-edge technology that will include projection mapping and, of course, sound. Made of brushed aluminum so the installation reflects sunlight by day after dark Echoes comes to life with video content incorporating brand new visuals from the band, the epic three-year tour and which is also, says its chief creative Steve Bramucci. “partly inspired by fans”.

This eight-minute video loop will be synchronized with audio mixed by Odesza's Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight. Known for the meticulous attention to detail they put into their music and all elements of the Odesza universe, the pair have also been heavily involved in the design and execution of Echoes.

Their 10-minute soundscape is built from soft ambient music mixed with vocal notes left for the band by fans about what Last goodbye The season meant a lot to them, with people commenting on things like how they never felt comfortable dancing in public until they saw the show, how music helped them cope with the loss of parents, grandparents, best friends and relationships, how they expanded the performances their group of friends and how this chapter of Odesza generally contributed to the joy in their lives.

It's a soundtrack with the power to bring tears to your eyes while listening to it at your desk, so it's likely to have a big emotional impact when fans at The Gorge experience it. (For fans who can't make The Gorge, the final show on July 6 will be live on Veeps.)

The work is designed “to be experienced in the rise before a show or fall after a show,” Bramucci says, “but you can tell that Odesza is thinking that people are going to sit here for a few minutes. They're not just going to walk by, do some Instagrams and bounce back.” Given the flow of crowds at The Gorge, Bramucci expects “97 to 98%” of attendees to pass through Echoes. (Another 3% will enter through the non-driving VIP area after installation.)

The hope is that fans will actually spend some time with a project that a global team has spent the last two months of their lives creating. Echoes takes influence from a design originally made in Russia by Russian creative studio Setup, with a second creative studio, The Vessel, expanding on this design and managing Echoes in the United States. Ship operator Jenny Feterovich is Echoes' creative director.

Meanwhile, Bramucci's team at Uproxx was tasked with the user experience, coordination and storytelling around the project, with a number of other AV and building graphics companies. A crew of 30 has been on site since June 30, working around the clock to get Echoes up and running by the time the doors open tomorrow at 5:00 p.m.

This challenge has been compounded by the logistics of working at The Gorge. “It's literally in the middle of nowhere,” says The Vessel co-founder Jenny Feterovich. “We have to truck everything that goes there, and there's no margin for error, because you can't run back to an office that's three hours away to go get something. Preparation here is of the utmost importance.”

The other big challenge is the weather – with construction crews bracing for possible high winds and certain heat, with temperatures during construction in the mid-80s and temperatures on show days predicted to reach the 90s and on Saturday they are expected to reach 100 degrees.

Echoes was designed on computers equipped with Snapdragon, a microchip from Qualcomm that uses predictive artificial intelligence to predict a user's movements in order to quit and restart programs and save battery life. On site, Snapdragon-powered PCs will be used to view maps, troubleshoot and modify plans in real-time, and the team will also run visuals and audio with Snapdragon PCs. Qualcomm also subsidized the project, with hard costs running into the high six figures.

“We found that there are a lot of synergies between Snapdragon technology and this kind of music,” says Qualcomm CEO Don McGuire. “EDM artists embrace innovation and are open to experimenting with technology and new tools, making them great partners.”

Ultimately though, all technology is meant to elicit a uniquely human response.

“If I see the face of even one fan who has a serious emotional connection to it, who says 'the diaphragm of my appreciation of music and what it means to connect with music has changed because of this installation, then that's the perfect win. says Bramucci.