“Even my subconscious is self-conscious,” Okay Kaya sings, giving us a sense of the mental state she entered while making SAP, an album she wrote, performed, engineered, and produced alone, spending weeks at a time without social interaction. This is a concept album about consciousness in which Okay Kaya focuses her combination of abstraction and wit on what happens to her mind unaccompanied, on her tendency to feel less like a human and more like the sticky secretion of a tree.

Okay Kaya’s investigations of mind-body come along with sexy dance beats, unpredictable interlocking synths, delicate soft guitars, and close-to-the-mike R&B whispering. But Kaya likes her falsettos cracking and her hooks careening wildly, a beautiful chaos that somehow fits together.

Kaya was excited to collaborate again, to get friends to “bless the record.” She invited friends to Gaia Studios in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to sing or play an instrument. Most songs on the album unfold with guest performances from artists as varied as deem spencer, Taja Cheek of L’Rain and Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches.

Just as the recording process began with isolation and ended with friends, SAP starts with the internal and leads outside to romance, to lovers who serve as funhouse mirrors, reflecting Kaya back to herself from different angles. Kaya harmonizes with her multi-tracked second self and sings her uncertain conclusion: “If love is not the answer, it’s one hell of a question.”

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