Following on from her 2020 Spellemann Award winning ‘Watch This Liquid Pour Itself’, Okay Kaya is back. Dead-set on exploring all things cerebral, upcoming album ‘SAP’ is an oozing, reflective journey into ego-death. Our first taste of the 4 th November release comes in the form of avant-garde single ‘Spinal Tap’ – a track that slinks down your spine and immerses you in Okay Kaya’s rich world of sound.
As ‘Spinal Tap’ awakens, you can’t help but feel yourself sink into it. The track, entirely written, performed, engineered, and produced by Kaya, serves as a otherworldly delight; Okay Kaya has crafted a woozy soundscape, vocals warm and thick as layered vocals slowly build. The track feels both soporific and enlightening, the combination hypnotic and gorgeous.
Speaking on the track, Okay Kaya explains that it aims to explore the strange reality of what dreams truly are; “I wrote ‘Spinal Tap’ because you may have believed your brain as an impermeable slate, your dreams as strictly food for Freudian thought,” Kaya explains, “but, according to a science.org article from 2019 on CSF fluid, dreams are “large oscillations of fluid inflow to the brain that appear during sleep… Slow oscillatory neuronal activity thus leads to oscillations in blood volume, drawing cerebrospinal fluid into and out of the brain.’”
This visceral, fleshy exploration of what makes us human is the foundation of ‘SAP’; the release aims to explore the dissociative absurdity of the human consciousness and body. This pondering has lead Okay Kaya on an intense journey of reflection – levels that made for deeply intriguing, bewildering ideas. When explaining the album name, Kaya presents the question: “What if you’re tree-juice? How far along the stem do you have to ride before you get away from your parents and realise you’re the tear of this person and the blood of this person?”
‘Spinal Tap’s trippy visuals are the culmination of Kaya and visual artist Austin Lee’s efforts. Sink in.
Words: Emily Swingle
