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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

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M. Sage - "Cloud Plexus"

Nicolas Jaar - Colomb

Purchase: bit.ly/3ZkQcnk
Catalog #: GN70
February 17, 2023
CASS+DIGI

Over the past few years, Andrew Osterhoudt has quietly curated a slew of comforting kosmische musik that gazes deep into the stars while peering just as deeply inward. Now, the Brooklyn-based composer sets their sights on more tangible artifacts and nearby nuance with 'Out Together', an earthbound fit of maniacal mindfulness mixed with calm chaos.
 
Constructed on a scaffold of juxtaposed symmetry, the two sides of 'Out Together' foil and compliment each other in delicate harmony. Live collaborations with Ka Baird and John Also Bennett (JAB) colligate with manipulated found sounds from records and digital audio files from old broadcasting sound libraries, recontextualized into moments of ambient turntablism. The search for harmony shines throughout. Take the final tones of A-side closer “Runoff” drifting downstream with bubbly textures and arpeggiated bliss, trying to reach harmony with the initial tones of B-side opener “Frequency.” The latter ultimately spotlights a fortuitous flute duet from Baird and JAB born from Osterhoudt’s own graphic score.
 
The patient pointillism and avant assurance of “Crowds” balances out the opposite side’s “Everyone Arriving, Eventually,” a tone poem of sand-like textures flowing through melodic reeds and other sonic detritus. “Undergrowth” awakens in a steam-drenched run of modulated meditation, focusing on Ka Baird’s singularly enraptured vocal exorcisms which perfectly reflect its B-side counterpart “The Breathing Green,” engaged in a din of rustic psychedelia with waves of buzzing, ember-like tones and unseen fauna.
 
As a whole, 'Out Together' presents a vibrant spectrum of feelings ranging from magnified isolation to zoomed-out, wide-angled euphoria.

Andrew Osterhoudt - "Crowds (feat. Ka Baird)"

Beautiful piano melodies, ballads drawing their inspiration from jazz, classical music and cinematic imagery, hummed choruses, a mood at the crossroad of nostalgia and reverie, instruments with uncanny timbre and charm, chiseled percussions, added to a subtle electronic production, this is the recipe for Tout Va Bien, the second solo album by French composer Ezechiel Pailhes.

Even if he defines himself as a “jolly fellow” (which is confirmed by the music and reputation of his electro-pop duo Nôze), when chatting to him, he comes across as quite gentle and stellar, just like this collection of eleven tracks that he composed “in autarky”, entirely alone, in his Montreuil home studio.

Following the footpath of Divine, his first solo release from 2013, this album is however more intimate, marking Pailhes' taste for finely crafted moods and drifts.

FT

Maria