The best bro-mance in the industry has rekindled their fire to bring you an awesome single titled “Far Away”. If you haven’t guessed by now based on the title alone, the bro-mance I am referring to is none other than Kill The Noise & Feed Me. It seems as though every time these super producers find the time to allot solely for the purpose of writing music, something magical is born. That was the case with “Thumbs Up” and is definitely the same for “Far Away”.
Now what is really cool about this particular collaboration alongside the absolutely breathe taking journey this track takes you on in terms of genre transformation and vocals; is the story behind it that was published by Jake from Kill The Noise on Facebook. 
I won’t go into great depth on what was said as I’ll leave it all in context and let you do the reading; but it’s awesome to hear about what goes into productions and the trial and tribulations artists face when trying to conquer their next piece. In short, “Far Away” has been in the cooker for 18 months but was set aside as both of these artists had huge summers and could not dedicate the required time to fulfill its production value needs. It may seems lame but once you listen, you’ll understand. “Far Away” was not completed during a late night miracle mile studio producing session, the track features a choir consisting of elementary level students, and you can anticipation the troubles with trying to organize a group of kids at that age for an extended period of time.
None the less, their is a video to accompany the song that is based off of the children’s artwork at the very same school that was used for the choir section. There is no information as to when or what the video will entail but I did read that it was to be featured in accordance with Adult Swim, that may be exciting!
With a powerful harmony composed by a young choir of kiddos and uplifting synth progression, “Far Away” keeps my foot-a-tappin’ and head bobbin’ but sure does take a trippy transformation in the break down. Have a listen and read the full story on the production of “Far Away” below.
here’s just some thoughts and history behind the song. totally off the top of my head
Feed Me and I have been making music together for close to a decade. We’ve written under various different names and labels and we probably always will.
Most of our collaborations happen in our off time while traveling internationally. He’s based in the UK and I’m in Los Angeles. Sometimes we’ll set aside a week while he’s in the states, or vice versa while I’m in the UK to lock ourselves in and write a song.
Far Away was an idea we started about 18 months ago at Feed Me’s studio. We both really wanted to try to do something together that was melodic and had some kind of unique vocal. When we work together we try to do something that people might not anticipate from a Feed Me x KTN collab. Since we’ve done so many now it’s getting harder and harder to come up with ideas that aren’t obvious, we love the challenge of that though!
So somewhere along that line of thinking is where we came up with the idea of doing a full on children’s school choir for the vocal.
We wrote the last few lyrics to the song literally on the ride to the school which was just outside of london first thing in the morning. Something meaningful, something simple, something open for interpretation, but most importantly something appropriate for children to sing! Which is more challenging than you might think!
we turned up, met the headmaster of the small schoolhouse, set up our recording equipment and jumped right to the school gymnasium full of 8 year old children, terrifying! It was particularly nerve wracking to me, because i was the only guy with an american accent. Every time i spoke about 60 little faces turned to me inquisitively like “this guy talks kinda funny, I’m not so sure about him”,
The choir / music instructor helped us as we nervously ran through the song a couple times. It turned out to be much easier than we could’ve imagined though. We managed to get most of what we needed in the first couple go arounds which left us with time to play around and get additional group vocals on the spot.
We learned some obvious things like how to work and speak with a large group of children, but also less obvious things like dealing with the reverb in the room by moving the mics closer to the louder singers in the group. There were no harmonies so the entire group was singing in unison, we had to work around kids singing slightly out of key a problem we didn’t anticipate and had to remedy on the spot. We moved some of the stronger voices that were singing on key closer to the mics. A simple solution and the results were better than we could’ve hoped for!
The song sat for a while half completed. We were both in the midst of heavy touring and individual album work. A couple of months ago we picked it back up, finished the song and decided that it definitely needed a video.
We brainstormed for a bit and thought it would be great to get the kids involved once again in the process. We contacted the school again and asked if we could have some drawings of the Feed Me and Kill The Noise characters created and the school was happy to make it an end of the year art project for them. Once we had the art, we came up with a basic concept for the video, based on the drawings, and found our first choice for the director / animator.
Luckily when we pitched the idea to Augenblick studios they were excited about it and a month later we had our video.
I think for the both of us this has been one of the most rewarding, challenging and interesting journeys our passion for art and music has lead us. There has been many points throughout the process where I’ve stopped and thought to myself, “this is what its all about”.
Jake
Awesome song, great story from Jake, can’t wait to see the video tomorrow night!