M. Sage

Matthew Sage is a musician, intermedia artist, recording engineer and producer, publisher, teacher, partner, and parent. Since the early 2010s, between Colorado and Chicago, he’s rendered projects with playful, nuanced velocity and a completist sensibility, assembling an idiosyncratic catalog of experimental studio music that sprawls in various directions.

While releasing solo music as M. Sage, he also, and often, engages in collaborations, namely his recent contributions to the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet, Fuubutsushi. In 2025, following Paradise Crick, his acclaimed 2023 debut for RVNG Intl., Sage delivers his next solo endeavor and direction. Tender / Wading finds the artist 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.

Born and raised in Colorado, Sage grew up playing drums, guitar, and any instrument he could find, joining bands throughout jr. high and high school before discovering the nascent DIY music culture on the internet. Between undergraduate studies, he founded the tape label Patient Sounds, releasing music from over one hundred artists as well as his own work, and under the pseudonyms Free Dust, Professional Flowers, Starling Murmurations, RxRy, and Wellington Downs.

In 2014, Sage moved to Chicago to attend graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied writing and intermedia arts. From his home studio practice, Sage became absorbed in the worlds of synthesis, dabbling with many generic tropes and styles, often incorporating field recordings and sound design elements fabricated with synthesizers and electronics. A steady stream of projects flowed through Patient Sounds and for a bevy of well-regarded experimental labels, including Geographic North, Florabelle Records, Noumenal Loom, Orange Milk, Moon Glyph, and Past Inside The Present, garnering attention from publications such as Pitchfork, The Wire and NPR.

Sage closed Patient Sounds on its tenth anniversary in 2019 and a year later launched Cached.Media, an imprint for collaborative musical projects, print objects, and other broadcasting and publishing experiments. As a performer, Sage prefers libraries, museums, and other unconventional spaces. Sage has also created sound design, installations, and original music for MoMA, The Whitney, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Sage and his family now live in rural Colorado, where he’s converted a pole barn into an intermedia studio, home to the playful sessions that yielded Tender / Wading. The album is a sweeping, serene vision of vitality, radical softness, and the reassuring sense of coming home, even if home has changed.