M. Sage

CAT #: RVNGNL143
Release date: September 25, 2026

M. Sage offers Brush Flier, surfacing material from sessions surrounding his 2025 album Tender / Wading. Whether “the weirdest, noisiest, stormiest, or most spacious” of the Tender / Wading lot, these six songs assembled with some distance from origin make a distinct, wild and enthralling grouping. “Daydreams from a different world,” the experiments of Brush Flier veer into glitchy jazz, dubbed-out electronics, pastoral Kosmiche folk, and beat-centric laptop music; a veritable sound sampler that reminds us of Sage’s boundless cross-genre capacity.

Tender / Wading found Sage, né Matthew Sage, in the foothills and pastures of Colorado, writing and recording — primarily on piano and clarinet, later embellished with guitar, modular synthesizer, percussion, and field recordings — while slowly nurturing a couple acres of neglected space with his young family, thirty miles outside his hometown. Shaped from the same season, he likens Brush Flier to the “outlier areas,” a brush pile of moments that were trimmed from the final tracklist. If Tender / Wading was cut directly from human experience, outlining his recalibration into country living now as a father, partner, and homesteader, Brush Flier surveys the scenes from a slightly more fantastical vantage point. 

Several tracks speak to what Sage calls a “yeehaw exoticism,” examining how notions of Western identity overlap with otherness and how the exotic can be found in the everyday. He cites Essays on Exoticism by Victor Segalen, in which the early 20th-century French polymath posits that “exoticism” is simply one’s “ability to conceive otherwise.” Sage recalls, “My sense of time and history and routine and landscape were changing, and I was deeply experiencing the difference between city life and rural life. That strange detection of temporal diversity was thrilling. Sort of a stalemate between city mouse and country mouse. Exploring moving so fast it feels slow, or so slow it feels fast.”

Like Tender / Wading, culled from his intermedia practice in a converted pole barn studio, Brush Flier plays with a contemplative kind of electro-acoustic barn jazz for the front range. Across these sessions, Sage embraced a more elemental and intentional songwriting style at the upright piano, an evolved approach after becoming more comfortable behind the keys with the Fuubutsushi quartet. Once reveries when measured against the realness of Tender / Wading’s intent, here, revisited in more open space, leaning into the wonder of it all, Sage can better appreciate when the dark clouds roll in ("Thunder Covered Brush”), a cosmic encounter with a stunt plane (“Stunt Flier / Grasshopper”) or jamming with wildlife (“Toads from Memory (Dub)”). No doubt listeners will as well.

M. Sage’s Brush Flier arrives September 25, 2026 as a digital edition from RVNG Intl.