Saya Gray Releases Brand New Single 'Annie, Pick a Flower.. (My House)'

Over the course of the last year, Japanese-Canadian producer and multi-instrumentalist Saya Gray introduced the world to her stunningly detailed music - her fidgety, richly detailed compositions have helped her carve out her own unique space in today’s musical landscape.

Having spent a lot of 2023 in periods of intense isolation, she made a welcome return earlier this year with the first chapter of her QWERTY project - a collection of seven songs, each one an atmosphere in and of itself, and an intimate one-off live show in London captured by NTS.

Today she releases her brand new single "ANNIE, PICK A FLOWER.. (MY HOUSE)" a delicate, airy composition containing a myriad of sounds, from tightly clipped bass guitar (Gray’s primary instrument) to the sounds of iPhone notifications chirping. Regarding the track, Gray says,

“‘ANNIE, PICK A FLOWER.. (MY HOUSE)’  was created during a period when I had severe pneumonia, unable to leave my home for weeks. These tracks sonically convey my relationship to technology and the unwanted entrainment, overwhelm and emptiness from lack of substance in relationship, art, and thought stemming from technological advancements.”

About Saya Gray

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.

Earlier this 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 - and in the process marking her as one of the most exciting, up and coming musicians operating today.

Photo by Jennifer Cheng