It’s a cliché to say that any given artist grew up in ‘a musical household’, but there is no other way to describe Saya Gray’s early years. The otherworldly multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter was born and raised in Toronto, by her mother – an immigrant from Japan and father, a Scottish-Canadian musician and sound engineer, who played lead trumpet for the likes of Aretha Franklin, The Temptations and Jeff Beck.

“The level of musicianship I was raised around was fucked,” Saya says with a laugh, “I’d wake up every day with people playing classical music from 8am to 11pm at night, I was just in the background like a sponge, soaking things up.”

It’s precisely that longstanding absorption of music as craft that has taken Saya to where she is now, forging off-kilter, lo-fi guitar lullabies which sound like they’ve been beamed from another planet. At age 2 she was learning piano, and through her childhood she and her brother would learn everything from trumpet, trombone, to saxophone – “we’d pick up any instrument we could get our hands on.” She spent her pre-teens and teen years playing in bands around Toronto, followed by work as a session musician, playing at jazz festivals from the age of 14, performing at Jamaican Pentecostal churches, touring around the world as a bassist and musical director for international artists.