Brett CallwoodElohim and Yoke Lore See Pastel Auras: In 2014, L.A.-based electronic musician Elohim had reached rock bottom. Struggling terribly with her mental health issues, including crippling anxiety, she had moved into a small cabin and would lie on the wooden floors and cry every morning. She was faced with a straight choice – fight or flight. She chose the former.
“I decided to fight the good battle,” she says. “I would work a job and then go to the studio, every day at around 5 p.m., and I would stay until 3 a.m. It was this really magical time looking back, because there were no expectations. I made whatever I , and it developed me as an artist and as a human being. I started playing and singing, and really starting to write about my struggles with mental health. That was when everything clicked. I released a song called ‘Xanax,’ which was me very bluntly speaking about my struggles with panic disorder, and the messages that I got were like ‘OK, there’s a greater purpose to doing this.’”
Elohim set about employing music as a form of therapy, writing songs with titles such as “Why Am I Like This?” and a series of EPs called Journey to the Center of Myself. The latter came out of a need to create during the pandemic.
“Right before everything went to shit, I was on the Group Therapy tour,” Elohim says. “I was selling out shows, doing meet and greets – it was amazing. And then I only got through about eight or nine of the actual shows, and that crushed me so much. I had all these plans – you have an album released ready a year in advance. What do we do as artists? All we can do is create. I felt really lucky to have music during that time. It felt like going back to basics. There was so much uncertainty, so I started creating so much music. My team was like, ‘We should put it all out,’ so that’s why we created this four part thing.”
The latest single is “Pastel Auras,” the most recent result of lockdown working. Her collaborator on the track is indie artist Yoke Lore.
“I come from a very artistic family, and my first big experience with music was at Hebrew school when I was little,” Lore says. “My family was sitting around a table, it was dusk, and we were lighting candles and singing ancient songs that people in my family have always sung. You could feel the power of it. I think I wanted to do that forever, after that. But yes, I started playing drums, and in college I joined the band Walk the Moon. Dropped out of school and toured with them for a while. Then I quit that band and had an existential crisis. Went to India and lived in a monastery for a year, came back and started playing the banjo. And now we’re here.”
Elohim found herself listening to Lore’s song “Fake You” repeatedly, and the opportunity to collaborate with the artist on “Pastel Auras” was too good to pass up.
“During texting during the pandemic, we made it happen and it was really cool,” she says. “I was nervous, because a session can be a little bit weird with someone you’ve never met before in your life. We had never spoken on the phone or anything, but I think instantly I felt comfortable, which was a relief. We had very similar sound selection in our brains. Every time one of us would play a sound that we liked, at the same time we’d be like, ‘that was amazing.’ So it was pretty seamless. We made the song in a few hours, with my brother. Adrian [Lore’s real name] came in with a beautiful notebook and sat down, and read us a poem that he’d written the day before on an airplane. It could have been incredibly awkward and weird, but it was so poetic, and beautiful and brilliant. We were speechless.”
Yeah, reading two pages of poetry at a recording session to people you’ve just met is a ballsy move, but it paid off.
“The song came from this poem that I wrote,” Lore says. “It was about a women who’s really important to me, but it’s kinda about the idea, the complicated nature of affection. A really intense power. There’s this idea that flowers killed the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were operating on this aggression and terror paradigm. Flowers came along and they flipped the script. They were like, you don’t need to eat or poison or destroy – we’re gonna do it with sex. We’re gonna make seduction more powerful than terror. After flowers were so successful, everyone started doing it.”
Thank god for flowers then, or we’d all still be eating each other. A version of that concept, of flowers taking over, was employed for the song’s video, filmed in the high desert.
“Places where you wouldn’t normally see flowers,” says Elohim. “So we did it in the high desert, and brought a ton of flowers. There still weren’t enough flowers. You don’t really see flowers in the desert, unless they’re coming out of a cactus.”
It worked out well, and it must have been a blessed relief for an artist suffering with anxiety to create something so freeing, particularly after living through the global pandemic.
“For me, my safe place is my home,” Elohim says. “That’s where I don’t have anxiety. But I had to push myself to walk out of my front door. So the pandemic was nice because I didn’t feel anxiety, but then I started feeling more sort of depression. Cut to a year and a half later of not leaving my house, first show back was Lollapalooza, 5 p.m. slot, and I was absolutely wrecked. The panic was taking over my whole being. So I got back into therapy. This year has been really hard for me and it’s been a constant battle – I’m just trying to work through it, honestly.”
Both artists are psyched to get this song and video out, and they both have shows and festivals planned for the summer. Flowers, it seems, conquer all.
Elohim and Yoke Lore See Pastel Auras: Elohim and Yoke Lore’s “Pastel Auras” single and video are out now.
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