♫♪  M. Sage - Data in the Details

Matthew Sage is having quite a year. Between dropping a monumental 2xLP under his own glitch-ambient guise’s belt, coupled with some incredible vinyl and cassette releases for others out on his own Patient Sounds imprint (particular props due to the debut vinyl release for Japanese droner Hakobune), the kid managed to go and get hisself married and move to Chicago, leaving us kindly Colorado folk (he was born and raised in Fort Collins, just north of Denver) for… I dunno, the cows?

But oh, this isn’t about me you say? Right, right, I guess this is about the mighty rise of the mighty M. (Sage, that is), and with all that “life” happening around him, of course the seasoned producer has been able to keep firing on all cylinders, here cranking out perhaps my favorite in his storied catalog, a new cassette for Geographic North, the latest in the imprint’s recent surge of aesthetically-aligned releases on the format. And while you hate to go ahead and call something an artist’s best-yet or masterpiece or something hyperbolic like that (hyperbole? Who, me?), Data in the Details sure does feel like the view from the top — a wide vista of a macro/micro-pointilist audio composite. Wow, what did I just write and what does it mean?!

Data in the Details is one of those pieces of music that is almost intimidating to search for the right adjectives when its title just says it all. There are two different approaches to one musical idea here, split between the A and B sides that both paint grand pictures with broad strokes of melody, harmony and rhythm. But each is done in a fragmented way with microscopic bits of sound. it makes you wonder if you’re looking at something huge, or maybe something really, really small, only so close up that the details themselves become larger, more significant.

All things — matter, electricity, sound — are made up of building blocks. M. Sage just happens to use billions of them to construct his sculptures, which is why the perspectives you can have when listening to Data in the Details are so many and myriad and fluid. Both sides give a nice bubble-bath of beauty, the A side a back-scratcher for sure, but the B side and its “Mover Isuzu Dub Edit” has a bounce that’s tough to not play favorite to. Stream or download both to your heart’s content, and grab the limited tape release over at Geo North before they are gone.

• M. Sage: http://msage.bandcamp.com
• Geographic North: http://geographic-north.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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