Part 1

Name: Matthew Sage
Occupation: Musician, intermedia artist, recording engineer, producer
Nationality: American
Current release: M. Sage's new album Tender / Wading is out September 26th 2025 via RVNG Intl.
Hometown Recommendation: Cocina Breakfast Burritos in Berthoud, Colorado. My go-to is the bacon egg and cheese medium spicy.

If you enjoyed this M. Sage interview and would like to stay up to date with his music and live dates, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, and bandcamp.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

That impulse for me sort of feels like a constant translation process. I was a college professor for ten years and often told my students that I think being an artist is kind of like being a modem.

Artists intake things and then modulate them and then spit them back out as objects, or texts, or music, or whatever. My impulse to create comes from that intake; experiencing things, reading things, watching things, looking at landscapes, whatever, and then modulating all that out as a signal.

That signal varies: music, writing, visual art, food, whatever. I guess that means I take inspiration from everywhere, and I am pretty omnivorous … the bandwidth is wide and it is my position in the process to narrow it down and synthesize it and turn it into whatever I am working on.

Like for my new record Tender/Wading I was – and still am really – working on fixing up and restoring a neglected little house on two acres here on the rural Colorado Front Range. Demolition, restoration, fast things like painting rooms, slow things like trying to establish native perennials in the pasture. I also became a parent in 2021 and my partner and I rounded our 10th wedding anniversary during the process.

All to say … I am processing those experiences, but also the materials of that life … rocks and plants and water, wind, chicken shit, rotten floor boards, electric cable, clean sheets, a cozy bed, fresh tomatoes from the garden, doom scrolls … and that gets my impulse going to make something.
 
For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

In the past my process was very chance-based in that I would just set up some gear and start recording and then play for hours. I still do a version of this, I suppose. A “generative” process.

Catch a Blessing is a good example. I made so much of that album by recording hours and hours of improvisations and gear exploration and then layering it, re-working it, sampling myself, etc.



It isn’t always so directly generative though. When I started playing with Fuubutsushi, our first album was very much based around “songs” for me. Concrete chord changes on piano.



[Read our Fuubutsushi's Patrick Shiroishi interview]
[Read our Fuubutsushi's Chaz Prymek interview]

The more I write on the piano the more I have found it to be a very fun place to work with restrictions – both my own technical limitations as well as the tonal limitations of the piano – to create song structures. Even playing the piano feels sort of generative for me though … It is very much a process built on intuition and exploration and happy accidents.

Lately I feel like the balance between planning and chance is something like this: I sit at the piano and take chances messing with chords and patterns and things. A song emerges. I work it into a structure and then record that. Sometimes I record two or three versions of that structure. Then I go back and layer on that in ways both very planned and also very chance-based.

It is an additive process. From there, my process becomes super reductive, but I will get to that later …
 
Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I had a great professor in my undergrad, Dan Beachy-Quick, who told me something like this; “If you are writing a poem, you should read at least 3 things before you write it. Could be poems, or movies, or books, or paintings. But read 3 things to make your 1 poem.”

I think I am constantly doing research and that it sort of builds up inside of me as a deposit that I have to then process into an artwork or song. Translation …

I think setting up gear in the studio is almost zen-like in that it requires slowing down. I love to set up a new station with a unique configuration of some gear as a kind of preparative action. Then I sort of wander off from there and make something.
 
Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I love working in the morning. Natural light, a latte or some sort of coffee drink, the window open if possible for more sounds and smells. Fresh air.

I also walk a lot when I am working; I will record for an hour or so and then take a break, walk around the pasture, throw the ball for the dog, maybe do some yard work or something, and then come back to the studio for another hour or two.
 
For Tender / Wading, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?

I did some work with the artist Pope.L (rest in peace) and he said this wonderful and kind of aggressive thing to me during our time collaborating back in 2019; “WRONG AND STRONG.” He did an interview with Louisiana Channel before he passed away and kind of elaborated on that same idea. There he says “knowing what you are doing is overrated.”

Before working with him, and I think because I am a product of an art school experience, I felt an almost crushing need to have concepts figured out before I could make something. I felt like my work had to have a thesis of sorts before I could even start making it.

Since working with Pope.L, I am always kind of working against that. I have learned to lean into my role in the process, which is less a creator and more just a translator; taking in experiences, culture, news, art, plants, food, sorrow, love and turning them into art or songs.

I like the phrase “make the map match the terrain” too. It seems silly to try and map out a landscape if one has never set foot in that landscape. We have to go out and explore and get lost and discover things first before we can go back home and make our map of what we saw.

The art isn’t the terrain, it is the map.
 
Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.

This album has followed the same pattern that most of my albums have followed, which is that making an M. Sage album takes me a few years. I used to churn out material, but I have appreciated slowing down and really taking my time with albums now.

I often spend at least 2 years in the first stage of just making stuff. Slow and steady. Messing around. Trying. Failing. Making good stuff, making bad stuff. Lots of demos and sketches and ideas and songs that also feel nearly finished go into a huge pool during this stage. This part is the most fun; it is improvised, chance-based, experimental, kind of pure … this is when I play music.

I make too much. Better to have too much and cut back, I think. This is the sort of exploration part. I get to get lost, to wander, to set up in one spot for a bit and make a lot, or drift through a few approaches until I find something that works.

The next stage is kind of like inventorying: I spend time with all those bits and pieces and hone them down into something that feels cohesive. Turning all that into an LP is a hard process, and it forces me to edit and modulate and moderate myself. But, I try to leave that stage with 40 minutes of solid material.

That is the map, the structure, and here the concept kind of reveals itself to me. “Oh, that is what this has all been about I guess!” From there, track titles lock in, the sequence shapes up, the sort of colors and textures of it emerge. Track titles are very very important to me and to how I make albums … that part takes a while.

The third stage has two parts; additive and subtractive.

I start adding stuff to those tracks in that structure. Lots of stuff. Too much. A super additive process, as mentioned earlier. Layers of textures, melodies, random ideas, good stuff, bad stuff.

Then, the most meticulous part for me happens in the subtractive process. I delete huge portions of tracks, cut whole instruments, rearrange melodies, etc. I usually spend about a year on this part. It is editing, but it is also a kind of sculptural process of carving away and refining and polishing. I think of Mark Bradford’s approach to his paintings as a good analogy. Tiny details are added or shifted or tweaked here too, and sometimes massive changes happen by accident.

Then, I am basically done and I just listen to it a lot. Probably too much. Different ways, different places, different mind sets … and I edit and revise and edit and revise. I usually make notes, make changes, and then one day it just kind of feels done. It usually isn’t, but rinse and repeat.