Musical duo Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya: ‘Basically our music’s for losers’

Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya’s collaboration was like a long-shot blind date, set up by a mutual friend who figured they’d make beautiful music together. Stiltz was an electronic composer and Kaya was a maverick singer-songwriter. Their recording session was almost scuppered when the producer skipped town before they arrived at the studio. But against all odds, the pair’s debut EP, Blurb, is a laconic treat of smart, vulnerable folk-pop in the left-field lineage of the Velvet Underground and Bill Callahan. “We clicked,” grins Kaya Wilkins, AKA Okay Kaya, “like the buckle on a belt.”

They met in Stockholm, at Pitchers, which Stiltz describes as “a weird simulacrum of a British pub, decorated with wallpaper of bookshelves – a very strange, specifically Scandinavian place”. The unlikely duo share the Scandi thing in common – Stiltz grew up in Stockholm and now lives in California, while Wilkins was raised on Nesoddtangen, a remote peninsula outside Oslo, before relocating to New York when she was 19. “I moved from one peninsula to another,” Wilkins says. “New York was extremely different, and I’d desperately wanted it to be different. I’d come from a very small, very homogeneous place, and I wanted to be somewhere exciting and vibrant and diverse all over.”

It wasn’t until Wilkins arrived in New York that she bought a guitar, acquainted herself with GarageBand and started sharing songs on SoundCloud. These tracks – sparsely arranged, her simple guitar parts wreathed in multitracked vocals, her breathy, knowing voice often centred in the foreground – were embryonic, sure, but were early indicators of her intention to “work on making stuff in a playful way”. She describes the beginnings of her career as “a weird bedroom fluke. It’s strange to me that it’s what I’ve done for the last 10 years. And now I can’t imagine doing anything else. In fact, I try to avoid doing anything else.”

Stiltz, meanwhile, had started early. “When I was a kid my dad told me if I learned Dust My Broom by Elmore James on his guitar that night, he’d buy me a guitar the next day,” he remembers. Stiltz and his axe quickly became inseparable. “It kept me occupied,” he says. “We didn’t have much video games and shit growing up.” He did, however, have a budding career as a ballet dancer. “I studied at the Royal Swedish Ballet School,” he says. “I’d loved dancing, but school killed it for me.” In contrast, music became “my perfect little secret. I discovered Sparklehorse and Bright Eyes. Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes was 13 when he made his first record. I was 12, so what was stopping me?”

He got a job at a nearby record store, where, he says, “the elders taught me to DJ”. Spinning records brought in money; moreover, it eased his younger, more socially awkward self’s anxiety over being in nightclubs. “I could be in the club with my friends and have a purpose,” he says. He was no genre purist – he loved electronic music from intelligent dance pioneers Plaid to Daft Punk, was a deep house evangelist with a downtempo sideline and signed to Axel Boman’s Stockholm label Studio Barnhus in his teens. “But the people who really inspired me are Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce, and Lou Reed,” he adds.

The last decade saw Stiltz producing rappers such as Yung Lean and Burna Boy, remixing Pet Shop Boys and releasing an eclectic slew of his own records, while Wilkins put out her own albums on Jagjaguwar and collaborated with King Krule. But both were hungry for a change of direction, and recognised each other as kindred spirits. At the ersatz boozer in Stockholm, Stiltz played Wilkins new music he’d written. “She liked it,” he remembers, “and that made me happy because I’d been in such a weird place.” They soon met again, this time in London, where together they wrote all the songs from Blurb, and travelled on to Stockholm, where Stiltz’s friend Daniel Fagerström (Viagra Boys) was to produce the EP. “But then Daniel realised he was supposed to be on a skiing trip with his family,” says Stiltz.

Having left the gear set up for them to record, Fagerström flew the coop. This proved a blessing in disguise. “We didn’t have a producer breathing over our shoulder,” Stiltz says. “We weren’t overthinking things – the immediacy and the intimacy of the moment took over.” And that intimacy is a key element of the EP’s charm – we’re eavesdropping as Wilkins and Stiltz harmonise, trading guitar parts and verses, like a hipster Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. “Kaya’s a very adult person, she’s already been through the Battle of the Ego, whereas I’m still in the thick of it,” Stiltz grins. “She offers the worldly, spiritual understanding, and I bring the embittered perspective.”

Their songs are loose, sweet and often funny. Tough Luck, a call to arms for fellow outsiders, is, Stiltz says, an anthem “for those who live their lives on their own terms, and those terms seem insane to other people. Losers, basically.” Pickle, meanwhile, is a delectably creepy love song wherein Wilkins dreams of preserving her lover in a jar. They love this edge. “A good pop song is awesome, but can be very one-dimensional,” Wilkins says. “The best music captures human experience, which is often sad and boring and funny and exciting, all at the same time.”

They’ve not recorded again since the EP, but hope to soon. “We’re both the captains of the project, steering this boat together,” says Stiltz. “Steering it straight into the void,” adds Wilkins.

Blurb is released on 24 January.