Elke

Black and white; yin and yang; right and wrong; retro and modern. Life is a balance of opposites. A pull in one direction and a push from another. But that’s what makes it interesting. Elke followed her dream when she was 18 and living in Pennsylvania, so she took $500 and an old Dodge mini-van and drove it across the United States to San Francisco. She arrived in the middle of the night and had to stay at a weekly hotel on Market Street but she’ll never forget when she woke up to the sun shining in the windows on a brand new city on a brand new life. It turns out that was just the beginning of her journey both as an artist and as a person. Soon after she ended up back in Maryland, playing open mic nights and singing covers of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Outlaws. That’s where she developed her love of country music and folk. The storytelling, the emotion, guitars, banjo and mandolin...her roots and the roots of America. A couple years down the road she ended up in Los Angeles. She met a man and fell in love and lived her childhood again for a while, city of angels, city of dreams. He taught her about beats, spoken word, poetry and rhyme and therefore she brought hip hop into her life. She pursued her childhood love of opera, classically training with Teri Brinegar and working in musical theater too. She worked on stage and recording projects in LA. with independent producers like Genuine Childs, (http://www.genuinechilds.com/) and Solo Goodspeed Media. Then she moved up north to Seattle and brought electronica in to her life. The magic of DJ’s, dancing and production. Elke has played many different venues in Seattle from local coffee houses (Kiss Cafe, Aster Coffee Lounge) to larger venues (The Last Supper Club, Columbia City Theater, Studio Seven etc.) by herself or in her previous project with her twin sister. In this latest project, “Love Songs for a Post Modern Paradise” she combines all these loves and opposites in life (country/folk, hip hop, classical and electronica) to bring together a sound that is both new and old and can touch everyone with a universal appeal.