Please is a sparser, softer, more refined version of the sweet, silly, and sometimes brooding style of stochastic glitch-pop that defined ODAE’s 2019 album Ataraxic. ODAE’s creative process is a fascinating feedback loop of inquisition and instinctive excavation; in their words, they create by “asking questions” to each instrument, then sculpting the unpredictable responses into aural poetry unified under the banner of their inimitable, head turning production style. Please pulls back from Ataraxic’s freewheeling collages of musical non sequiturs in favor of a renewed focus on texture and space; each sound inhabits its own unique niche, rippling gently through the stereo field as if underwater. Mixing and arrangement become complementary, synergistic practices under ODAE’s direction, underpinned by a remarkable interplay between aesthetics of careful restraint and unrepentant maximalism that closely mirrors their experiences in managing their muscular dystrophy.

-Maxie Younger

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My muscle structure is soft, and the cells are not glued together well. Any forceful exertion of my body will cause me harm, so I must be gentle and focused about my movement at all times. I put so much care in my stillness that I find myself existentially lost in it -- having progressively adapted a kind of numbness, ever in dissociative response to the slow deterioration of my body. As soon as I understood what was happening, I wanted to escape that numbness.

And the discovery of love (and a drug or two) revealed to me the sheer intensity of happiness and sadness there is to give, and how much pain I would have caused myself had I not unlearned the will to express it. I reckon with the prospect that the mundane scope of feeling that prevents me from falling apart is something that would do me better to accept, and that this can still leave me happy and fulfilled, and that the value of my experiences can be determined by how much I wish to zoom in.

Attention is the tool I wield.

The music isn't explicitly about these things, it's more informed by these experiences. A use of that attention. Many of my thoughts about this record revealed themselves after a year spent listening to it. Please seems to have emerged from a world of boredom, docility, apprehensiveness - the behavior I tend to explore in my work, but forward a little further in time. It's a bit more confident. Its structures are tighter. This isn't the end of my exploration of myself; It will likely be a bookmark that I appreciate (or cringe at) when I am older, and wiser, and smaller.