In 2022, Saya Gray released a collection of songs that introduced the world to her incandescent music – entitled 19 MASTERS, it demonstrated her unique ability to create a collage of sounds that felt both comforting and disorienting, vast yet intimate. Last year, she returned with brand new music, a body of work that signified an exciting new chapter, the tightly packed yet thoroughly exhilarating EP: QWERTY – a multi-faceted project that will continue further into the year, consisting of recorded music, live shows and visuals. The first part consisted of a 7-track EP released in May on Dirty Hit (Wolf Alice, Rina Sawayama, beabadoobee) and perfectly encapsulates her genuinely unique method of creation.
Sensing the ever encroaching threat the modern digital world places on her mental health, and following a period of loss and grief, Saya entered a period of isolation to set about sampling and compiling existing snippets she compulsively records with an almost always-on tape machine. Whether it’s voice notes from three years ago, a sample of her drummer playing Jungle rhythms or a ridiculous thrash riff her brother interrupted the sessions to play her – it all gets fed through an MPC to create a body of work far greater than the sum of its parts – as Saya herself describes it, she puts ‘1000 personalities in one song’. It’s this unfiltered, frenzied approach to her art that she feels is necessary to reclaim her sense of self in an ever changing world.