M. Sage - Tender / Wading Vinyl LP

Tender / Wading finds Matthew Sage, aka M. Sage, returning to the foothills and pastures of Colorado, writing and recording in a patch of his homeland where each act of sympathetic care informs the next. Built primarily on piano and clarinet and embellished with guitar, modular synthesizer, percussion, and field recordings captured around 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 spanning multiple sonic directions, with releases on Geographic North, Orange Milk, and Moon Glyph, earning both critical attention and a devoted listenership. In 2023, he debuted on RVNG Intl. with Paradise Crick, coinciding with his work in the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet Fuubutsushi, and now delivers his next solo endeavor, marking a new direction. Tender / Wading follows Sage’s return to Colorado after nearly a decade in Chicago, where he now tends a few acres of neglected land with his young family thirty miles outside his hometown. In contrast to Crick’s synthetic sound-world, this album emerges from the act of nurturing growth, questioning domestic constructs, and reckoning with the footsteps of his former self through the lens of the present. The result is his most autobiographical work to date, shaped by time, perception, and the subtle details of lived experience.

Sage likens seeing different versions of oneself to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous rabbit-duck theory: “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.” Here, the subject and viewer coexist: a partner and parent cutting back brush, humbled by invasives and clay soil, while the wily academic within him still thinks in memes and feels the pull of a cell phone. “This album is about feeling out those perception changes, giving them room to do both: to hop and quack.” This inner child guides his intermedia practice in a converted pole barn studio, where poems become drawings, backyard sculptures, birdsong experiments, and clarinet practice give way to serious music. “There are lines that tie it all together,” he says. “For this album, there’s a lot of stubborn optimism and hope, but also being present with this late-stage moment and dealing with its rhetoric.”

Musically, Tender / Wading presents a distinct sound: pastoral folk Kosmiche, contemplative electroacoustic barn jazz for the Front Range, colored with pale puddle blues and rusted oil drum reds. Many tracks began on a 1910 Hamilton upright piano, left behind by previous owners and inhabited by mice—a cosmic encounter that shaped Sage’s songwriting approach post-Fuubutsushi. Comfortable behind the keys and the drum kit, Sage embraces woodwinds and the elemental, infusing his compositions with structural warmth and heft from the start. The album synthesizes his studio experimentation and improvisation with a sharpened focus on melodic phrasing and chord changes, distilling a usual bounty of demos into nine tightly realized tracks. His world-building signatures remain: woodhouse toads swimming in static, rustling grass, rain piddling in gutters, and waltzing constellations under moonlight. Where Paradise Crick drew from magical realism and digital fantasy, Tender / Wading is rooted more directly in human experience. Sage pushes back on calling it a conceptual record: “I’m just making the music I’d want to hear in my headphones while weeding or whatever.” And yet, like the rabbit and duck, it is both deeply personal and abstract—a natural and compelling evolution from a twenty-first-century experimental artist whose legacy continues to grow in real time.