Everybody wants to feel safe and to be safe from the hazards of the outside world. But life almost can’t be appreciated without that feeling of knowing and comfort, but sometimes you discover that things are not what they seem, and what you thought was the truth becomes an uncertainty. In your renewed search for the truth, you often have to put yourself in a place of danger, the exact type that you’ve been trying to avoid. This journey is depicted quite artfully in Yoke Lore’s music video for “Cut and Run,” which we’re premiering today.
Yoke explained via email that the song and its video deal with personal stuff, but weren’t necessarily inspired by a singular experience. “This song is about how it is sometimes ok, and maybe even beneficial, to do the opposite of what’s good or healthy for you. I move at different speeds attempting to find the perfect balance of movement and sound—the perfect center between effort and grace. It’s not a moment in my life, but more so, all the moments. I’m always fighting this question a little bit: how hard to try, how much effort to give; conversely, how calm to be, how to use tranquility as a soft weapon like water crashing against rock until it wears away. Does hardness make strength or does it just leave us rigid? But, in the end, it’s ok to be too hard sometimes, and it’s ok to be too soft sometimes. Life is a pendulum that we all gotta learn to swing with.”
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Shot outside of LA in Angeles National Forest and in the basement of a Dollar Store near Long Beach, the video is a visually captivating whirlwind of emotions. Yoke moves at different speeds throughout the landscape, encountering different forces and obstacles on his way to discovering the clarity and peace he longs for.
The video also provided a chance for Yoke to attempt another personal project: “I wanted to use this video to try and slow me down to see what it would look like. I want to find the perfect middle of movement: where I am not moving too fast through anything I start to miss information and detail, but not too slow that I never get anywhere. Life is a movement. I think it is on us to figure how to move along with it, otherwise we will get left behind by the world. But if you outrun everyone, you’ve left the world behind. Either way you slice it, you end up alone. In investigating my movement, I guess I’m sorta trying to figure out how we can all be a little bit better connected. If we all travel at the right and relatively similar speeds, the drive is a lot safer and everyone gets where they need to go.”
Watch the music video for “Cut and Run” above.
