Plike was initially created as a solo project by electronic music producer & composer Mad Madam Em in January, 2014. After releasing her debut album, 47th Helen, Em returned to the studio and began to collaborate with fellow electronic music producer ASH. Em and ASH first met in 2003 while working together at a musical instrument store in Clearwater, Florida. The duo quickly discovered that they each desired to create the same dark, experimental style of music and began playing together, with Em on bass and ASH on guitar. In 2005, they relocated to San Diego, California and formed the industrial / electro band Bishop Buzzkill. When Em created the band, she initially named the project "P'like" as a contraction for "pretend like", but on releasing the second album, Em and ASH decided to remove the apostrophe, changing the project name to simply "Plike". Em's debut solo album, 47th Helen, tells the story of Helen, a woman whose psyche has fractured due to painful traumas in her past. Confined to a psychiatric hospital, Helen's different personalities tell of her struggles with depression, addiction, fear, and self doubt. The inspiration for the album's concept was born from Em's own struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition that affects 7.7 million adults in the United States. Plike's second EP, Empathetic Apathy, incorporates a variety of musical styles, including trap, witch house, and trip hop, as well as elements from genres such as dubstep and drum & bass. Em's signature childlike toy pianos, cinematic strings and ethereal vocal sampling join together with ASH's expert synthesis engineering and sequencing to form a strangely hypnotic dance of light and shadow. While Empathetic Apathy is not a conceptual album in the same vein as 47th Helen, it paints a vivid picture of many of the struggles we face living in modern day society, touching on topics such as LGBT rights, female inequality, and America's deeply embedded fear of nuclear war.