Purchase: bit.ly/3wjrs0f
Catalog #: GN65
Apr. 16, 2021
LP+DIGI

Matthew Sage is about seeing the big picture, but focused through the most intimate and personal lens possible. Best exemplified on the gauzy, cartographical opus 'A Singular Continent', as well as his impulsively meditative Geographic North debut 'Catch a Blessing', Sage’s imagination yields fully realized sonic suites to worlds both imaginary and referential to his own. 

Now, the Chicago-based composer, producer, label owner, and publisher returns with 'The Wind of Things', a personal and pastoral oblation to the wild and wind-blown waters and mountains, both from Sage’s own memory and writ large. Absent are the processed sounds and filters that have come to define Sage's work; the album finds Sage stripping away the synthesized sounds that alchemied his past work into aural gold, instead favoring an entirely acoustic and natural 
palette.

Sage called upon a myriad of long-time collaborators, who together form the aptly-titled Spinnaker Ensemble (featuring Patrick Shiroishi, Chaz Pyrmek, Nate Henricks, Chris Jusell, Allison Sheldon, Martin Albertz, David Hirsch, Matt Wenzel, and Ang Wilson) to help realize his vision and further the melodic potential of the living and breathing field recordings that permeate the album. Tapping into an intimate sense of self, these field recordings derive from natural places that are significant to Sage. Lakes, mountains, and rivers he grew up boat-racing on and swimming in; tall fields of grass in rural Nebraska near his family’s birthplaces; wildlife on the pond of his in-laws home in Texas; the harbors and beaches of Lake Michigan that he frequents; all serving as places of occupation for these compositions to live in and blow through.

Opener “Cloud Plexus” is a fog-laden float in a calm lake of unrestrained optimism. The serenity soon glissades into “Harbor Dive”, a shimmering and elegant rift of sloshing harmonies. “Launching Mossing Scow” finds its flourish in the flotsam, tinkering with rusted refrains and oblong melodies. The action quickens with “Zephyr: Ponderosa Pollen,” charting a speedy course with only a shoddy sonic sextant as its guide. “Starboard Reach” offers a moment of playful clarity before “Luffing Adrift” and “Sail-Shaped Light,” a murky pool of darkness and light that ripples into the ether.

“Slipping the Mooring/Pond” opens the B-side in an amorphous din of familiar auditory accoutrements that gather into a single, slow-motion blur. “Dazzling Shallow Bay,” “Portside Mark,” and “Tell Tail Tale” play a dreamlike suite of a waterside piano finding its fins and diving below the waves, discovering its blithe buoyancy, and exploring the depths unencumbered by the weight of the world. The hopeful meditation of “Spinnaker on a Southerly” serves as a calm before the (rain)storm that is “Hiked Way Out,” a welcome reflection on past, present, and future maritime melancholia.

The Wind of Things

Buy LP/DIGI

M. Sage - "Portside Mark"

taken from the forthcoming 5LP / 5CD box set "Electroacoustic Works" celebrating Iannis Xenakis' 100th anniversay on May 29th, 2022. 

Newly mixed by longtime zeitkratzer sound engineer Martin Wurmnest, mastered by Rashad Becker.

Out in January 2022

IANNIS XENAKIS - Mycenae Alpha

a song from Echotourism Vol. 3
http://echotourist.bandcamp.com/album/va-echotourizm-vol-3

it is about one beautiful ukrainian village
and with some field recordings from there

summer-winter 2013

picture by Boris Litovchenko 

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Sedniv

hawthorn

taught me to hit, taught me to loosen (sheng 笙)

Lesser heard punk sounds from NYC collector & DJ Sara A.
 
https://www.nts.live/shows/sara-a/episodes/sara-a-9th-february-2024

Sara Abruna - Angela Conway / Bruce Gilbert Special 090224

Off Of "Two Hearted" (2011):

https://blithefield.bandcamp.com/album/two-hearted

Buy LP:

http://messyliferecords.bigcartel.com/product/blithe-field-two-hearted-lp

Crushing

Coffee

Carmelita Fox

From the 'Extraordinary Renditions' compilation.

smarturl.it/DEEK-ExRenditions
smarturl.it/DEEK-ExRenditions-iT
smarturl.it/DEEK-ExRenditions-BC

Crushing

Blithe Field