Stadiums & Shrines
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Dreams of Sweden with M. Sage

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Sailing again; doing anything else was a foreign notion. Even from his perspective—easily pleased within the right company, and nearly colorblind—the dog understood.

He wasn’t able to see the details his master so closely admired—the way emerald leapt from the mountainside, the way cyan bounced off the ship masts, or how gold momentarily engulfed the city, which, as the days came to their close, would sink directly into the horizon, drowning its noise for the night.

True, the dog wasn’t able to recognize that.

To him, it was all heard in chimes and muffled cracks, like bells in the foreground and fireworks in the distance. A symphony of confusion.

To him, it was all seen in grey chaos. A warped mirror held against the dark, brackish water.

This version of that magic was the only kind he knew, and the Baltic Sea approved.


____

Matthew Sage is a veteran abstractionist from Fort Collins, Colorado, who recently shared not one, but two albums with us, and will be here next week.

c.STRS

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And so, the great meteor show had reached its finale. And the dots which spanned this sphere for over two years can finally be connected. ‘A grin. A thin line between the sun and the sky.’

c.STRS is it for Rx. His final, and his finest, transmission. The infinity of space is a fitting place for an end; there was nowhere left to go within a void, within this character’s fiction.

 

 

Thanks Matt, that was fun.

Lux Collapsing

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The stable wasn’t meant to last. It was a temporary resting place for a herd that didn’t truly exist—one they’d see racing across the prairie only when the sun blinded just right.

Over the last six months Matthew Sage has shared with us Lux‘s many formations and collapses—additions, subtractions, re–framings, etc—from demos to what finally settles below. Normally both purists when it comes to hearing unfinished work, both Nathaniel and I wouldn’t have necessarily signed up to be inside Matt’s process; this just happened out of friendship and trust, and we’re quite thankful it did. Much of the exchange took place while we were arriving at Dreams and the overall next shape of S&S, and as a result, Lux Collapsing became the soundtrack to our own process, and is now uniquely embedded in our infrastructure. Personally, this is the closest we’ve ever been to a single recording.

There’s something almost perpetually undone about Lux Collapsing—as if destined never to fully crystallize, but rather circulate like dust in a room, exposed to motion, coating the surfaces of the subconscious. A sense of curious unease is present throughout; it drags us off the edge of “Prairie Belle”, stalks the fable of “Sweeping Glances”, and climbs the minor strings of delicate closer “Two Exteriors: Daylight”. In Matt’s words, the album is a “40 minute, eight track meditation on light in the west, decay and forgetting…a post-classical ambient piece, focused on the profound nature of light and timelessness.” At its core Lux borrows from old vinyl cuts, which have been stretched and subdued to distant memories. Suspended above them, and intertwined, cello, flute, and guitar work from Sage and a cast of Fort Collins friends complete the movements. It’s a massive if modest collection—one might say just right, depending on the time and space of any given day in flux.

Stream the release in its entirety for the first time here today, and be sure to support Patient Sounds’ Kickstarter so this LP can get pressed (and if CMJ bound, it swirls live October 17th).

 

Music for Cubist Guitar

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The backyard seemed twisted that night, as if viewed through an uneven pane; not quite sure where the ivy began and the trees ended, maybe it wasn’t real, maybe it was the scotch, maybe it was the glass of ice cubes left on the windowsill…

Inspired by a light fixture exhibit last fall, Fort Collins-based artist Matthew Sage made Music For Interior Shadows, his way of interpreting absent space through the distant extraction and rearrangement of old records. The result was an eerily replayable collection of ambient, era-bent material. It also framed an interesting relationship between Sage and the subtlety of objects, one that almost demanded further exploration. And fortunately, now comes another study, similar in tone, different in execution. Music For Cubist Guitar originated from watching a documentary on the 20th century art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque known as Cubism. Sage was drawn to the idea of depicting subjects from a multitude of perspectives, by literally breaking the plane, and reforming its matter in a more abstract (and dynamic) context. The object became his own guitar-centric folk, which he then shattered and stretched across time, turning ordinary chords into serene, crystallized wavelengths of sound. The arresting sequence is streaming in its entirety below:

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Get it all in a zip over at Patient Sounds.

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