After returning from Chicago to a Berthoud farmhouse in his home state of Colorado, experimental musician M. Sage began planting the seeds for a bold new phase of his music career.
When Colorado native Matthew Sage first stepped foot on his two-acre plot of paradise in the Front Range foothills north of Boulder County, he couldn’t shake the feeling he was inheriting “a legacy of neglect.”
After nearly a decade of university teaching in Chicago, the experimental musician and recovering academic returned to his home state in 2022 with longtime partner Lynette in search of a quiet place to make art and raise their infant son. Surrounding the young family’s newly purchased farmhouse, which had itself seen better days, was a dull sea of weathered hay grass so pummeled by decades of tractor tires that virtually nothing would grow.
“It was very sad land, which is a byproduct of the monolithic agribusiness of the West,” the 38-year-old tells Caribou Current on a laid-back weekday morning at Amante Coffee in North Boulder. “It was hard for it not to feel a little bit like what we’re inheriting generationally: this neglect of our ecosystem, our economy and the wellbeing of folks. It felt like, ‘Here’s a little part of something we can work on.’”
So he got to work. Not just on restoring the battered landscape and the fixer-upper where Sage would raise his now four-year-old son, but on crafting the gossamer world that would become his critically lauded new album, Tender / Wading, released last fall via the Brooklyn-based independent record label, RVNG Intl.
Tinkering in his newly converted barn studio, the multi-instrumentalist began arranging sparse yet soulful compositions on clarinet and piano. Threaded with field recordings gathered among the flora and fauna surrounding his property, the resulting album’s 42-minute runtime thrums with the sublime force of a living thing stretching up toward the sun from the topsoil.
“I feel like I’m a farmer, but my crop is music,” he says. “I work seasonally in that way, and that’s the part that’s taken me a long time to lean into: An arts practice can be agricultural, I think. I’m working in the field to make something I can export to people’s Apple Music.”
Communion with the land is familiar territory for Sage, who grew up in an outdoors family among the peaks and plains of Larimer County. His 2023 album Paradise Crick also drew energy from the natural world, braiding electronic and acoustic elements into a wash of subtle psychedelia that would feel at home around a Colorado campfire during a psilocybin retreat.
“With the last record, it was easy to be like, ‘Oh, it’s electronic ambient: It’s pastoral, glitchy, whatever.’ But then with this one, the label was kind of like, ‘We don’t know how to pitch this,’” he says. “It was a curveball, I think, for everyone — including me.”
Part of the marketing challenge was due to the fact that, for all its patience and negative space, Tender / Wading is a busy album by M. Sage standards. After years of apartment living in Chicago, the space and privacy of his new farmhouse digs offered a chance to incorporate bigger rhythms and more song-like structures to his finespun soundscapes.
“It’s the first time I’ve had a big studio room, and it sort of made me confront the fact that this is what I’ve been building toward,” says Sage, who also plays drums and piano in the cult-favorite ambient jazz ensemble Fuubutsushi. “I’ve always wanted to be a working artist, whatever that meant, and I’m there now.”
“That kind of fucked me up, honestly,” he continues with a shrug. “Here I am as a working artist. I’ve worked really hard to get here. Now it’s time to do that.”
!["[My new album] was a curveball, I think, for everyone — including me." - M. Sage](https://zeta.creativecirclecdn.com/mountainear/original/20260204-163248-4a6-phpmGdHj7.jpg)
With a fresh sense of purpose underfoot, Sage’s new rural life in Colorado has been marked by interlocking roles as a father, artist and patron of the land. Settling into his routine on the farm has been replete with its own lessons on life and art, revealed little by little, season by season.
“There’s repetition in it, but then little surprises pop up, and that’s where you have to find the delight or the joy or whatever,” he says. “It’s a lot of cleaning up chicken shit, working in the garden and turning compost when I can, then going and playing synthesizers for a couple hours. It’s pretty dreamy.”
But this new life didn’t always seem like a foregone conclusion. Thinking back to when he first laid eyes on the exhausted landscape surrounding his weathered farmhouse, and the years-long journey of letting native grasses reclaim what the agriculture industry had beaten out, Sage finds a lesson from one of his favorite poets: Walt Whitman.
“Such sweetness grows from such corruption,” he says, paraphrasing a line from the American transcendentalist. “You have to put shit into your life in order to make blueberries, you know? You have to have rot. In that way, rot is kind of sumptuous. Neglect is sort of sumptuous. Because it holds potential for something creative or new or beautiful.”
Sage says it all adds up to something pretty radical. That may not be the first word you’d associate with his patient and ethereal music inspired by a quiet life on the farm — but for an artist bent on restoring beauty in a beaten world, it’s the only one that will do.
“I think being emotionally available is radical, and I think being in touch with a landscape is radical. Slowing down enough to notice seasonal changes or pay attention to a single plant as it grows over a year, those are radical things,” he says. “And in that way, I think softness is also radical.”
LISTEN UP: Tender / Wading by M. Sage is out now via RVNG Intl.
