SAYA GRAY
ANNOUNCES INTERNATIONAL QWERTY TOUR
QWERTY II EP OUT NOW
LISTEN HERE
Following on from the the release of QWERTY II, Saya Gray’s expansive new EP, she today announces a run of international tour dates across the United Kingdom, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. Pre-sale tickets go on sale Thursday, April 4 at 10:00 AM local time. General on sale begins on Friday, April 5 at 10:00 AM local time. Sign up for the ticket presale HERE.
Last year, Japanese-Canadian artist Saya Gray released a 7-track EP called QWERTY – not just a body of music, but a statement of intent of what was to come. Evolving beyond audio, the project embraced visual art, co-created with her longtime creative partner Jennifer Cheng, alongside a series of spellbinding live performances notable for their pindrop intimacy. Last week she marked the next chapter in her journey, with her much anticipated followup – QWERTY II.
Born out of the large periods of 2023 she spent in studious isolation and a deep-seated unease regarding the encroaching digital world, the 7 tracks perfectly demonstrate her stunningly detailed compositions. Speaking about the new release, and its relationship to what came before Gray describes it as “a collection of ideas and collages stuck together as the ying to the yang of the first half”. The sequel maintains her distinctive, scrapbook-like approach to music-making – live instrumentation cascades alongside computerised interference as we see Gray attempt to separate the human from the ones and zeroes. Now, she takes both records on the road to celebrate them in all their glitched-out, mosaic glory.
Saya Gray – QWERTY Tour – Dates
May 16 – Brighton, UK – The Great Escape
May 18 – Berlin, Germany – Baketown
May 19 – Paris, France – La Boule Noire
May 22 – London, UK – ICA
May 24 – Manchester, UK – Deaf Institute Lodge
May 25 – Bristol, UK – Dot to Dot
May 26 – Nottingham, UK – Dot to Dot
May 30 – San Francisco, CA, US – Rickshaw Stop
June 1 – Los Angeles, CA, US – The Moroccan
June 4 – Brooklyn, NY, US – Sultan Room
June 6 – Toronto, Canada – Longboat Hall
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. 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 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 (Wolf Alice, Rina Sawayama, beabadoobee)
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.
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My life is a soundtrack, i track my life through music, photography is my passion, my escape, my expression. Without both i have pieces missing, thankfully i’m blessed and get to combine both.
Born in Manchester, lived in Australia for 22 years where i was heavily involved in the Australian Music Industry, firstly in bands (Singer) and then managing bands (all original), I moved back to the UK, Wales specifically 10 years ago
