200 Words: M. SAGE
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by one of us (Marc Masters or Grayson Currin) and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
There’s only one piece on Data in the Details, done twice: first as a "heads up extended edit”, then a “mover isuzu dub edit.” But the music Matthew Sage crafts is so slippery, so elusive to concrete analysis, that this tape feels like it contains multiple albums inside of it. When I listen with an eye toward writing about it, Data in the Details confounds me; I have trouble figuring out which part to grab onto, and when I return it sounds different than I remembered. But when I listen with my ears, it suddenly seems much more present and alive: loud and clear where before it practically disappeared.
Even if I can’t describe the music, I think I can at least get at why I can’t. It’s not that there’s so much happening in Data in the Details – though there is a lot there – but that the barriers between all the elements are super fluid, often melting into invisibility. Often that tactic makes a grey sonic mush. But M. Sage manages to use it to produce music that hits targets without limiting itself to them. It means something, nothing, and everything – which, after all, are the same thing.
– Marc Masters
M. Sage on Data in the Details
This past summer I worked a part time job at an upscale patio furniture lifestyle store. I was moving to Chicago, and needed some extra cash for expenses. One day a week I would do data entry, and two or three days a week I would help move large orders from the warehouse to customers’ homes. I had never paid much attention to the look, the style, the lifestyle, the materials that constitute patio furniture, or the strange culture of this market. Who does? People who buy it, people who sell it. I only moved it, or entered data about these furniture items into a computer system.
On a delivery job to an isolated hunters’ farm in eastern Wyoming, I started to notice. It was a large, and expensive order. We loaded up the trailer, blasted across the sprawl to this farm, and assembled prefabricated poly-plastic deck chairs, bar-height round pub tables, a ten foot long dining table. The awful wind smelled like scrub grass and manure. I snuck into the house to refill my water bottle from the glistening copper sink, the water tasted slightly metallic. In the front yard there was a splayed rabbit carcass. The bar tables and chairs were dark charcoal grey, the dining table butter cream, all compressed poly-plastics.
Data in the Details is out now on Geographic North. Buy it here.