Tender / Wading finds Matthew Sage, aka M. Sage, in the foothills and pastures of Colorado, writing, recording, and returning to a patch of his homeland and identity, one act of sympathetic care informing the next. Constructed primarily on piano and clarinet, and then embellished with guitar, modular synthesizer, percussion, and field recordings captured around the perimeter of his home, the album is a sweeping, serene vision of vitality, radical softness, and the reassuring sense of coming home, even if home has changed. Since the early 2010s, Sage has assembled an idiosyncratic catalog of music that sprawls in various sound directions, manifesting with releases on Geographic North, Orange Milk, and Moon Glyph, and garnering both critical attention and a loyal listenership present for each new turn. In 2023, Sage debuted on RVNG Intl. with Paradise Crick, which coincided with his ongoing output within the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet, Fuubutsushi, and he now delivers his next solo endeavor and direction. Tender / Wading follows Sage’s return to Colorado after nearly a decade in Chicago, now nurturing a couple acres of neglected space with his young family thirty miles outside his hometown. In a holistic contrast to Crick’s synthetic sound-world, Sage renders art from the act of stewarding new growth, questioning constructs of domestic life, and understanding the footsteps of his former self through the dirt-smeared, sweat-fogged lens of the present. The yield is his most autobiographical material to date, marked by time and changes in perception and meaningful details from Sage’s psychic search.
Sage likens the sensation of seeing different versions of yourself to the famous rabbit-duck theory from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “It’s the same drawing, but depending on who you are, where you are, and when you are, some people see a rabbit and some people see a duck, or both,” Sage explains. Here is the subject and viewer, back in familiar landscapes, a partner and parent, cutting back brush, humbled by invasives, infestations, and compacted clay soil, his priorities vastly changed. And still, that other self is there too; a wily academic who often thinks in memes and feels the tug of a cell phone in his pocket. “This album is about feeling out those perception changes, giving them room to do both: to hop and quack.” It is an inner child that leads Sage’s intermedia practice in his studio, a pole barn converted during home-wide DIY renovations after the big move in 2022. Inside, poems become drawings become backyard sculptures and beyond, and silly excursions into birdsong or enjoying the challenge of learning the clarinet give way to serious music. “I think what I’ve discovered is that there are these lines that tie it all together,” he says. “And for this album, there’s a lot of stubborn optimism and hope in it, but also being present with this late-stage moment that we’re in and trying to deal with the rhetoric of it.”
For Tender / Wading, Sage deploys a distinct sound: a pastoral kind of folk Kosmiche, contemplative electro-acoustic barn jazz for the Front Range, brimming with pale puddle blues and rusted oil drum reds. Most songs began on a 1910 Hamilton upright piano, curiously built in Chicago, left behind by the previous owners and inhabited by mice. The chance encounter with the instrument felt cosmic, not just for its link to the Windy City, but also given Sage’s evolving approach to songwriting after Fuubutsushi. He’s become more comfortable behind the keys and getting back behind the drum kit (his teenage love), and within a fittingly woodwind space, embracing the elemental and intentional, giving the music more structural heft and warmth from the onset. Tender’s M. Sage synthesizes the studio experimentation and improvisation of his past with a sharpened ear for melodic phrasings and chord changes, culling his usual bounty of demos down to a tight final nine. His world-building signatures remain, from woodhouse toads swimming in static to rustling grass and rain piddling in the gutters to waltzing constellations under the moonlight. Where Crick’s universe was born from magical realism and digital fantasy, Tender / Wading cuts from the human experience more directly. He’s quick to push back on notions of it being a highly conceptual record; “I’m just making the music that I would want to be playing in my headphones while weeding or whatever.” It could be both, as the rabbit and duck would assert, deeply personal and abstract, a fascinating and natural turn from a twenty-first-century experimental artist whose legacy continues to shape and grow in real-time
TRACK LISTING
A1. The Garden Spot
A2. Witch Grass
A3. Chinook
A4. Wading The Plain
A5. Open Space Properties
B1. Telegraph Weed Waltz
B2. Fracking Starlite
B3. Field House Deer (Mice)
B4. Tender Of Land
