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Catch a Blessing

by M. Sage

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  • Limited Edition LP - Black Splatter
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

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  • Limited Edition LP - Green Splatter
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  • limited edition 12" vinyl record
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    "Merch table" copies of the 2nd pressing of this LP direct straight from the artist. Clear vinyl with green splatter. Long sold out from most retailers! Available here since live gigs aren't happening. The last 10 copies of this LP!

    Includes unlimited streaming of Catch a Blessing via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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about

Matthew Sage is a composer, producer, label owner, and publisher based in Chicago, IL. Since his earliest recordings, Sage has carefully considered and crafted each of his various approaches to experimental music. His debut LP A Singular Continent was an endless epic that charted imaginative aural cartography and seemed to soundtrack actual worldbuilding. Now, after five years personal changes and growth, Sage returns with his tried and true sonic trademarks, but with a noticeably liberated approach to his brand of experimental studio music.

Catch a Blessing shows Sage in a much more impulsive light. Where past work existed in space that was cerebral, meditated, and composed, the music here is more natural, playful, and effort-less.

Opting for chance and the unknown rather than rules and conceptual rigor, Sage "practiced" an amorphous technique that led to profound moments of accidental, unplanned beauty. And the perks were plenty. As Sage explains: "Learning to know less and to just feel more about what I am making has become important to me. I like, or am learning to like, the possibility of that openness, that uncertainty. Not knowing. It is uncomfortable, but it is nourishing."

Recorded over a summer in a tiny room on the second floor of a 120-year-old apartment in Chicago, 'Catch a Blessing' is the result of and the meditation on the exquisite exhaust and lavish lushness of his crumbling (and rebuilt) locales.

Presented as a collection of ornately expressionistic portraits of Chicago, Sage approached the album more as paintings or sculptures than musical compositions. Album opener "Avondale primer Gray" unfurls a calm but vibrant quasi-melody that dissolves into a blur of found sonic objects both familiar unknown. "Lions to Baffle" is a semi-synthetic symphony of muted, sax-laden alien jazz, while "Elevator Straffing" maintains a whirling, glittering hum of echoed dissonance. "Claiming Air Rights" could be the literal sound of a piano floating through space, levitating despite an impossible weight. "Michigan Turquoise" brings an exquisitely eerie hymn with the same ghastly grace of Sparklehorse. Album centerpiece "Window Unit +Three Flat" is an open-ended epic of texture and ambiguity, immediately followed by the warped and trickling elegance of "Polish Triangle". "Wolfe Point Fog" closes 'Catch a Blessing' with peculiar focus, departing with an open-ended and wholly optimistic focus.

The moods and modes are constantly, entirely at odds with themselves: private vs. public, abject vs. profound, rural vs. urban(e), and so on. Where other players of experimental studio music take a more high-minded, often stuffy approach, Catch a Blessing floats in airier, more refreshing modes. It’s endlessly lush but sincerely marked by decay. This is naturalism in the truest sense.

credits

released April 5, 2019

ADDITIONAL MUSICIANS :
Jesse Ball : Bamboo Flute/Cudgel
Logan Corcoran : Percussion
Chris Jusell : Violin
Willy Smart : Violin
Matt Wenzel : Tenor Saxophone

MASTERED BY :
Sean McCann

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS :
Tiffanie Lynette.
Mick & Peggy. Wanda & Leroy.
Siblings & Niblings.
Bobby & Farbod.
Lake Michigan.
Jacowo Mornings.
Granny’s Piano.

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M. Sage Colorado

Matthew J. Sage

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