Okay Kaya Photo: supplied
Okay Kaya is the musical project of model actress and composer Kaya Wilkins. The Norwegian American musician has spent the last few years playing her sold out European tour, developing a solo exhibition in Copenhagen, and writing her latest record Oh My God—That’s So Me.
After relocating to a remote Island outside of Oslo Wilkins has been able to access a deeper sense of solitude giving her more time to write and focus on a simpler and more stripped back album.
The simpler instrumentation is buffered by a cluster of strings from cello, violin and viola and sophisticated lyrics drawing on her love of Greek mythology and ecology. Okay Kaya asks the listener to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Picture This begins by asking the listener to imagine themselves as “Sisyphus as a health-nut geologist”
It's quite common for Okay Kaya to oversee every aspect of her music. 2022’s album, SAP, was entirely produced, engineered, and written by her, an approach she maintains with Oh My God—That’s So Me.
The cosmic narrative heard in songs like Inside of a Plum, which creatively imagined scuba diving in space continues in Okay Kayas new music. Her cover of English folk singer Shirley Collins' 1960's song Space Girl develops on the artist's fascination with intergalactic themes, a recurring motif in her music.
The wannabe feels familiar, much like an acapella performance with its raw and unadorned simplicity.
The Groke was written in -25 degree temperatures. Inspired by the Moomins, a family of characters that feature in a series of children's books written by Finnish author and cartoonist Tove Jansson (Torvey Yanson) in the 1940’s and 50’s. The melancholic song centres around the lonely creature's icy heart and ability to freeze all it touches.
Den Samme Jodlen which loosely translates as ‘the same yodel’ takes a plucky folkier twist and gently loops in on itself.
Oh Minutiae’s thick bass line grounds phrases like “the devil lies in the details” and earnestly questions why humanity takes comfort in cliché.
Okay Kaya’s Oh My God—That’s So Me is a bizarre, original and charming record clearly made in its own vacuum. With moments that both shine and equally leave you perplexed.
