Track By Track: Feel Freeze on their debut EP

We had both left our older bands and decided that the next project should be really thorough and meaningful. We didn’t want to decide on the genre or musical style of our new project, but wanted the process to take us there. In the beginning we lived together in a small apartment without doors in Copenhagen. The only time of day we weren’t together was when Ray rode on his bike to the studio and Mathias took the bus. Both musically and humanly creating the EP was an amazing, intense, inspiring, frustrating and blissful process. When you create something together you simultaneously develop your art, yourself and your friendship.



Thematically the EP revolves around the effects technological development has on our emotional relations in the digital age. We use screens and pictures to attract each other and tell stories about ourselves. We believe there is something missing in this communication – the undertones and pigments, which we need to be with each other, to exchange emotions and learn from each other. One of the goals of our music making is to slow down the rush of digital affirmation - freeze feelings, pause time and try and capture emotions of the here and now.

Wet My Tongue

When we made the demo of "Wet My Tongue" we knew we had reached a milestone in our process. The song is a musical journey that takes off in a light acoustic setting in 6/8 time signature, but transforms itself into a 4/4-based eerie and melancholic universe with cutting guitars, deep bass-drum and bubbly synthesizers. In spite of the differences it is certain that those two parts come together as a whole. 

The lyrics were written on a cold winter evening, where snow and frost kept everyone inside and apart – the easiest way to communicate with others was through computers and social media. We came to think of the online society: when we sit there, not meeting each other IRL, we start creating images of each others lives based on the way we see them on screens. It gave us an empty feeling of cyber-loneliness. A feeling that we wanted to transform into music and a cry for real life human connection. 


The song is also inspired by the film “Jurassic Park”, which we were really digging when we wrote the track. In the studio we’d have neon light lighting up a huge T-Rex poster. We could almost hear the roars of T-Rex and the Brachiosaurus herds while composing the track.

Give Me Your Heart

And then we totally turn on a dime. The second song, "Give Me Your Heart" is a whimsical and warm love song with acoustic guitar, electronic beats, playful synth bass and last but not least a floating flute solo - which, incidentally, is played by Mathias’ mother. The two tracks opening the EP show Feel Freeze's span from a melancholic and dark sound to the optimistic warmth of "Give Me Your Heart". We exist in this duality. 

The song is about love on several levels. First of all, it’s about falling deeply in love without looking back. It is a song about that moment where everything comes together and feels magical, but also about universal love between people across borders, cultures and norms. It’s about lowering the barricades and facing the world with openness and trust. It's about listening to what others have to say with an open heart. Therefore, we always encourage people to hug a stranger when we play this song live. We want to unite.

Lights Off

"Lights Off" has had a very long journey from the first idea to the final version. It started out with a kind of Christmas-vibe to it and the working title "Snow", but ended up here in a darker, more worried universe. The lyrics revolve around revisiting your childhood-home as an adult with blurry childhood memories and the ghost of all the unsaid things whispering from the corners and cracks of the house. 

Being very far in the process we were unsatisfied with the vocal melody of the chorus. We used the computer to cut every sung word apart from each other and then put them back together in a new random order. It created this strange melody line that jumps in unnatural intervals and lyrics sounding something like: “face tha’ anti da emma duh”. We immediately liked it, and decided to use it instead of the original chorus.

Wet My Tongue (Reprise)

Wet My Tongue has been very important in creating the sound of Feel Freeze and therefore we had a lot of sessions with different takes on the song. We like this floating instrumental version without the beat and decided it would be a good mid-way intermezzo on the record.

Power Plug

When we started writing this song we were very inspired by a piano sample that Clock Opera uses in their song "Belongings" - we wanted to make a song based on a piano sample too. "Power Plug" was on a really long creative journey - there were so many elements in it that we had to kill some darlings! The piano sample ended up not being in the final version, and we also skipped a long outro where the lyrics had a summarized conclusion of what the song is about - which is actually good, because this way it’s more up to the listener what the song is about. We can reveal that our thoughts revolved around death, rebirth and the notion that humans could restart each other if we fix our power plugs and switch it back on.

After finishing the EP we came across the Swedish TV-series Real Humans that shows people having robot editions of themselves made after their death. We find these emotional approaches to the technological development very exciting and complex!

 
One day Mathias had his iTunes on shuffle and something very noisy and slightly annoying was playing, but then it stopped abruptly and our demo of Young (Again) started. We really liked the contrast that made "Young (Again)" sound even more young, calm and spiritual, so we decided to make our own noise intermezzo. It is made with synthesizers and guitar pedals, but it also includes a buzzing television and our friend Anne saying weird crying sounds into the microphone, which we pitched down so it sounds like a very sad alien. 

If we as human beings could delete an experience or a memory we imagine it could sound like this.

Young (Again)

This is the oldest song on the EP and it is also the one that ended up closest to its original demo. We were working on another song that had the working title "Young" and came to a standstill, so we started playing the guitar parts in a faster tempo. We felt like we had something and recorded it immediately and wrote the vocal part, which we later reversed and stretched to give it the strange feel. We were both very inspired by Sigur Rós at the time and liked the static and meditative feel of the bass, vocals and guitar parts coming together like a chanting. Coincidentally our friend had a glockenspiel in our rehearsal space, and we improvised this theme and build the beat. It was all there in one day almost. 

The lyrics are about being reborn, transitioning or starting all over again. They are very simple and it goes like this: “And you let go / And you swim through / And you reach out / There’s no other place where you’d rather be”.

Some time after we wrote the song Ray came out as transgender, which put the lyrics in a new light personally for us. But in general we all go through a lot of transitions in our lives, which is a very interesting process that you are not really aware of before you stand at some point and look back at it.



Future Emotions in a Digital Heart is out 2 December.