Ayka is the pseudonym of Norwegian-Turkish Ayca Lingaas. In 2021 she released her debut EP, “I’ll Show Myself Out Now”, through LUFT Recordings, and she has loads of new material scheduled to see the light of day by the end of 2022. She already mesmerized audiences from Norwegian stages like By:Larm, Henie Onstad Art Center, and USF Verftet in Bergen. Ayka’s lyrics reflects upon the ups and downs of life, in all their banal and grave forms. She conveys these themes through a contrastive sonic landscape ranging aesthetically from soft to rough, dipping into both electronic pop- and traditional folk-music. Ayka could, for the sake of confusion, be compared with the likes of Connan Mockasin and Lilly Allen. Laughter and tears are welcome!

Music has always been a part of the Turkish-Norwegian artist's life. Born Ayça Lingaas in Liverpool, UK, where her mother was studying at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and her father was a musician, she was surrounded by creative people from her very first moments. The family moved to Germany when Ayka was still tiny, before relocating again to Norway when she was around 4. Her parents (including her stepfather, who her mother met in Norway) were studying as she grew up, and so the family moved often – as much as once a year, until Ayka was 12.

"It felt adventurous, moving around and meeting new people," Ayka reflects. "I think the longest I've lived somewhere, still, is about a year." Among the moves, her constant was music: her mother would blast Madonna and Sting, while her stepdad was a punk who introduced her to the Sex Pistols. He would bring her to his home studio when she was as young as 6, where they'd make recordings of her singing and playing her acoustic guitar. At around 10, she started taking an interest in GarageBand, teaching herself how to make simple loops, inspired by her love of Gorillaz and Amy Winehouse. By the time she was a teenager, she'd discovered Soundcloud R&B – predominantly her lo-fi hero Abra – and was taking the production more seriously.

She was uploading covers of Abra and Kali Uchis to Soundcloud when her now-label manager reached out, and expressed an interest in her delicate-yet-tough voice. She agreed to record a few songs, with no intention of it really going anywhere. "I was always satisfied with it being a hobby," she laughs. "Or maybe I'm just lazy." But those sessions revealed a bright, bold new songwriting voice, full of immediacy and a playful sense of the surreal.

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Ayka

'Eleven' featured in BandCamp's 'New and Notable'

See Ayka at by:Larm 2022

Analogue Trash covers 'Hey Punk!'

'Eleven' rated 5/6 by Aftenposten

Ayka releases sophomore EP 'Eleven'

'Hey Punk!' featured in NRK P3

'Fifteen Minute Lover' featured in Bonafide Magazine

Ayka releases single and music video for 'Fifteen Minute Lover'

Q&A with Ayka

Ayka releases single 'Cobalt Moment'

Ayka releases first single from upcoming EP

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 as "a tiny record marking my coming of age as a musician". It's both a small, tongue-in-cheek statement and a huge one; in that way, it mirrors her songwriting, where seismic and serious details are woven into grunge-pop melodies that feel light and breezy. Like any good coming-of-age story, 

is filled with angst, joy, romance, and of course, anthemic choruses. "It's a conscious first step into the sonic world of adulthood," says Ayka, never far from laughter. "Yeah, I’d like to try making music, like, 

Eleven

Fifteen Minute Lover

Cobalt Moment

Hey Punk!

Iallefall

Ingin' Ways

With Ayka, nothing is quite what it seems on the surface. On the confident "Fifteen Minute Lover", she drizzles a delicate, sensual R&B melody over melancholic chords, and creates an ocean of space in her production. "It's clearly a song with sexual innuendos, and it’s easy writing it off as a ballad of seduction – but it’s more about the loss of a friend than a lover," she explains. "I guess you could picture me rolling around in velvet, but I'm doing so in a very desperate and sad manner."

The dreamy ‘Cobalt Moment’ is the second offering from Ayka’s ‘Eleven’ EP following the equally blissed-out opening single ‘lallefall’. On the latest release, she sings frankly about battling depression, 

"I’ve had my fair share of blue happenings and it can be very physically exhausting," 

. "Suddenly grocery shopping and dental hygiene becomes more of a drag than usual. You gotta make it kinda fun when you musicalize these moments – otherwise it’s too depressing and people can’t listen to it as much. To deal with the seriousness of life, you ought to take it not as seriously."

 The song is characteristically Ayka: a beachy guitar-pop song that wouldn't sound out of place on a long summer afternoon, even as the chorus is crying out for relief from sadness.

For her second EP, Ayka spent time at a farmhouse just outside of Oslo, going into a cocoon where she could evolve and finetune the songs even further beyond those first intuitive sparks. This time, the majority of the songs were written at the beginning of a new relationship – when she met her current boyfriend, she immediately wrote a bunch of songs – while others deal with depression and insecurity. She describes it as "much more personal" than her 2021 debut, as well as having a richer sound owing to being co-produced in a studio. Adding to that personal feeling is the fact that the record includes her first ever song written in Norwegian, "lallefall". "I've always been hesitant to write in Norwegian," she admits, "because it's more intimate writing in your own language. It's like being naked. Though, it didn’t take more than a little jazz tobacco and downtime till I found myself enclosed in the Norwegian woods writing Norwegian riddles." The resulting song, with its layered vocals and washes of guitar, feels as blissed-out as a stoned day of watching the sun peek through the trees.

It was when dropping out of a “liberal but fully capitalistic millennial pastel palette media-degree”, that Ayka shifted her focus towards music. The Norwegian songwriter had till then been in a handful of various creative projects - dabbling with sound, art and text. Despite this, the local and “laissez-faire” art school wasn’t a fit either, and it was inevitable something had to change. I’ll Show Myself Out Now isn’t just her debut EP; it represents a document of the artist re-focusing how and what she wants to create and communicate.


I'll Show Myself Out Now

C.W.G.B

Tuna Tune

Tokyo Garden

Window Gazer

Eleventh Ode

Ayka has shared the dream-pop wanderlust single, Tokyo Garden. Sitting somewhere in between Tirzah and Broadcast, it shows Ayka proving herself equally adept at close-quarters folk and straight-up pop bangers.

Pop has always been at the centre of Ayka’s life as has a firm sense of DIY. “Apart from music, all other aspects of my life have been a drag” she says. “I flunked a lot of elementary school and listened to ABBA and Sex Pistols instead. We moved a lot and my father always made sure to set up a DIY-studio. I never learned how to read music, but I wish I did, although some say it’s a blessing. Not being classically trained feeds into my ego - both good and bad.”

After years of holding her music close, Ayka, with a little nudging from her friends, is finally ready to share it with the world. Tuna Tune is a shimmering debut single, which teeters and sways atop woozy synths and blurred reverb. It’s a track born out of a writing session with techno producer MRD and his pet cat, Sonja, but is indie lo-fi perfection in its lilting melodies and washes of sound.“I think a lot of time was spent sipping beer and playing with his cat, Sonja. I’ve later discovered that drinking and hanging out with animals is a usual session-thang. I tried writing through Sonja’s feline perspective. The encounter of someone new and the relaxed being of a cherished pet. It’s probably the most laid-back song I’ve ever done. It’s chill. And skater dudes agree - it’s been used in a couple shredding-montages.” Ayka explains on the track.

Ayka

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