Under his M. Sage moniker, Matthew Sage has always cultivated a unique sonic garden, but his latest offering, “Tender / Wading,” feels different. Set for a September 26, 2025, release via RVNG Intl. (Japanese import CD via Plancha), this album and its lead single, “Tender of Land,” are less a departure and more a deep, resonant breath drawn from the Colorado foothills. After a decade in Chicago, Sage’s return to his homeland, nurturing a couple of acres with his young family, is palpable in every note.
Gone is the synthetic sheen of 2023’s Paradise Crick. Here, Sage crafts a soundscape primarily from the organic warmth of piano and clarinet, embellished with guitar, modular synths, percussion, and field recordings — the very sounds of his new-old home. This is “pastoral folk Kosmiche,” an introspective “electro-acoustic barn jazz” that hums with a vital, radical softness. “Tender of Land,” the album’s closing track and the first taste, embodies this ethos. It’s a patiently unfurling composition, like the slow, deliberate work of reviving neglected land, and it uses sound to encourage new growth.
The accompanying video for “Tender of Land” is a fascinating visual counterpoint, compiled by Sage from hundreds of flea market slides documenting Colorado’s Front Range in the ’80s. These “operational images” are fed into a rudimentary video system Sage built, resulting in a “clumsy” yet charming “poetics of failure.” Sage notes that the machine “can’t quite comprehend what it is looking at. It starts to name things, and in doing so, creates a kind of poetics of failure that sees a hillside as a hare.” It’s a striking visual metaphor for the album’s core theme: perception and the ever-shifting nature of identity, much like Wittgenstein’s rabbit-duck illusion.
Tender / Wading is Sage’s most autobiographical work yet, a profound exploration of self through the lens of domesticity and the physical act of stewardship. It’s a record that asks us to consider how our surroundings shape us and how we, in turn, shape them, all while offering a serene, deeply felt sense of coming home.
Tender / Wading will be released on September 26, 2025, in vinyl, Japanese import CD via Plancha, and digital editions.
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