Saya Gray

In 2022 Saya Gray released a collection of songs that introduced the world to her music – entitled ‘19 MASTERS’, it demonstrated her unique ability to create collages that felt both comforting and disorienting, vast yet intimate. Last year, she returned with new music, a body of work that signified an exciting new chapter, the tightly packed and exhilarating EP: QWERTY – a multi-faceted project that so far contains two instalments of recorded music, live shows and visuals. The first part was released in May 2023, the second in March 2024 – both on Dirty Hit. Sensing the ever encroaching threat the modern digital world places on her mental health, and following a period of loss and grief, Saya isolated herself 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 guitar part her brother interrupted sessions to play her – it was all 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 an unfiltered, frenzied approach to her art that she felt necessary to reclaim her sense of self in an ever changing world.

Sensing the ever encroaching threat the modern digital world places on her mental health, and following a period of loss and grief, Saya isolated herself 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 guitar part her brother interrupted sessions to play her – it was all 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 an unfiltered, frenzied approach to her art that she felt necessary to reclaim her sense of self in an ever changing world.